Transforming the workflow for financial reporting

code agile digitalisation codeborne web development

From Word documents to a unified platform: Tackling workflow inefficiencies

How did it all start?

Shared Research is a business with over a decade of experience in financial report writing and translation for Tokyo Stock Exchange companies JPX. They approached us with a vision and a challenge: to streamline their existing processes and enhance efficiency. Our collaboration aimed to optimise their workflow, enabling seamless writing, translation and publishing of financial reports. The result? A custom-built writing and publishing platform—but in reality, it turned out to be much more than just that.

Optimising the initial workflow

The first step was understanding the existing process of writing and translating financial reports. At the time, their workflow was entirely offline, relying on countless Word documents passed back and forth between financial analysts, translators, and companies—in two languages. This approach created numerous pain points, including:

Managing multiple versions of documents.
Consolidating changes into a final master file. It quickly became clear that streamlining report management would significantly improve their workflow—and this became a core focus of our project.

Project management

What makes the new system multifunctional?

The new writing and publishing platform addresses these challenges with a suite of features designed to improve efficiency and simplify collaboration. Here are the key highlights:

Centralized collaboration: All reports and translations are stored in one online platform, ensuring that everyone works on the same files in real-time.
Integrated workflow: Writing and translation happen within the platform, making it easy for translators to see what needs their attention.
Task organization: Writing and translation tasks are managed directly on the platform, eliminating the need for additional tools.
Template-based reports: Users can start new reports from templates, significantly speeding up the writing process.
One-click publishing: Publishing reports to sharedresearch.jp is as simple as clicking a button.

Additional features include:

Commenting on reports for better team communication
Translation tools for smaller text segments
Client details management for streamlined operations

What about old reports?

One major challenge was migrating existing reports into the new system, complete with their translations. To address this, we developed a custom importing tool that allowed users to upload old reports directly into the platform. The tool handled most of the work, requiring only minor corrections and final checks from users. This solution not only simplified the migration process but also enabled Shared Research to start using the new platform quickly and effectively.

Results

Our collaboration with Shared Research delivered significant value across multiple aspects of their business:

Enhanced workflow: Writing and translation now take place within a unified system, improving efficiency and reducing errors.
Improved productivity: Streamlined processes allow analysts to cover more companies and work more effectively.
Complete migration: Hundreds of old reports were successfully imported into the new platform, ensuring continuity.
Effortless publishing: Reports are now easily published on sharedresearch.jp. These improvements align seamlessly with the SharedResearch website transformation project, which introduced personalized reports, improved findability through SEO, and seamless human translation features. Together, these innovations are bridging the gap between Japanese companies and international investors.

Working with Codeborne

At Codeborne, we pride ourselves on creating custom solutions tailored to our clients’ unique challenges. By understanding the business vision, we can leverage our technical expertise to make it a reality.

Our partnership with Shared Research exemplifies this approach. Their innovative ideas, combined with our ability to implement them, resulted in a powerful, multifunctional platform. Together, we continue to refine and expand the system to meet their evolving needs.