We start with the report your business actually runs on, not the easiest one to automate. The important one is usually also the most manual.
The reports that matter most tend to have the most exceptions, which is exactly why they never got automated. Every attempt runs into a special case, someone concludes it cannot be done, and the manual version continues. Meanwhile it is the report with the highest cost of being late and the highest cost of being wrong.
We treat the exceptions as the requirement rather than the obstacle. Each one gets written down, agreed, and built in, including the ones that only apply to a single property or a single channel. Where a rule genuinely needs judgement, we flag it for a person instead of guessing. The result handles the normal case automatically and puts a human only where one is actually needed.
10 properties. 4 countries. 11 hours of manual entry gone from the monthly cycle.
Month-end dropped from days to around 40 minutes. Delivered in four weeks.
If previous attempts stalled on special cases, bring those cases first. They are the useful part of the conversation.