Blog | Coherent

Introducing Coherent Insights

Written by Coherent Blog | Sep 23, 2025 6:34:35 PM

Most enterprises know they run on spreadsheets. Few can actually see them.

They power financial models, actuarial calculations, and critical decisions. They also hide errors, duplicate effort, and legacy logic buried so deep no one remembers who built it. Audits drag on for months and still miss key risks. Transformation projects often stall before they even begin.

It’s not that spreadsheets are the problem. The real problem is visibility.

You can’t automate—or control—what you can’t see.

That’s why we built Coherent Insights.

It's an AI-powered solution that illuminates your Excel environment. Insights shows you the spreadsheets your business truly depends on, maps the risks and connections between them, and highlights which ones are ready for modernization.

Instead of spending months chasing answers, you start from clarity—reducing risk, accelerating audits, and building a foundation for automation at scale.

What is Coherent Insights?

Coherent Insights is more than an inventory. It’s a new way to see your spreadsheets as an enterprise system.

By instantly scanning your entire Excel estate, Insights helps you:

  • Discover & catalog – Automatically surface files across teams in a live, searchable inventory.
  • Assess risks & dependencies – Detect errors, broken links, and compliance gaps before they escalate, giving risk and compliance teams defensible audit trails.
  • Automate documentation – Generate instant analysis and audit-ready reporting in minutes, so finance and actuarial teams can validate models before they impact reporting or pricing.
  • Scale transformation – Identify the models ready to modernize, helping IT and transformation leaders gain visibility into EUCs before migrations.

With Insights, every team sees a clearer picture of the spreadsheets they rely on—what’s safe, what’s risky, and what’s ready for change.

Why did we build Insights?

Because most enterprises start in the dark.

Every audit, conversion, or transformation starts with the same costly question: “What’s in scope?” And answering it can take 6+ months —time lost before the real work even begins.

As one customer told us:

“Before we automate spreadsheets, we need to know what we have—and where the risks are.”

Coherent Insights changes the starting point.

It gives you an always-on view of your reporting landscape, so visibility isn’t a one-time project. It’s continuous, up to date, and ready to support every audit, compliance review, and transformation initiative.

Organizations begin from knowledge, not guesswork—making real change finally possible.

This is how we deliver what our CEO John Brisco calls “touchable ROI”.

It's AI-powered intelligence that scans thousands of spreadsheets to deliver instant visibility, risk detection, and dependency mapping. Not a one-time audit. Living intelligence that shows you which models are critical, where the risks hide, and what's ready to automate.

For Finance teams, this solves two mission-critical problems:

Problem 1: The Visibility Crisis

CFOs are blind to the spreadsheet architecture underpinning close, statutory reporting, treasury, and audit. Finance teams don't know which spreadsheets feed which outputs, where external data originates, who owns which files, or which models actually drive material financial decisions.

Why this matters: Without visibility, critical calculations change without detection. Regulators challenge data lineage. Errors and anomalies go undetected until after close or audit—leading to restatements and reputational damage. Finance transformations fail before they start because no one knows where the risks truly lie.

Coherent Insights delivers instant clarity:

  • Map end-to-end process flows across Close, Treasury, and FP&A
  • Rank spreadsheets by financial significance and risk exposure
  • Detect broken links, inconsistencies, and missing data before they impact reporting
  • Identify redundant processes that slow close cycles and inflate compliance costs

Problem 2: The Governance Crisis

Even when Finance knows what's out there, there's no control over how data changes, who approves what, or what version is the truth. Every month, reporting packs are manually updated, values are adjusted, and auditors must reconstruct what happened.

Why this matters: This lack of control erodes trust in financial results. Manual adjustments go untracked. Undocumented changes create audit findings and potential misstatements. Each audit cycle becomes a manual evidence hunt consuming hundreds of hours and delaying sign-off. CFOs face regulatory scrutiny and potentially fines when reporting can't be explained.

Coherent Control establishes governance at scale:

  • Publish the final, approved dataset with traceable lineage
  • Formalize approval workflows (Draft → In Review → Approved)
  • Detect manual overrides and produce AI-generated diff summaries
  • Deploy preconfigured reconciliation templates for rapid audit readiness
  • Expose control health in real-time to dashboards and GRC platforms

The result: Finance moves from operational drudgery to strategic value. Audit cycles shrink from quarters to weeks. Regulatory confidence replaces reactive firefighting. And transformation projects finally launch because teams start from knowledge, not guesswork.

How do Insights & Control fit into the Coherent platform?

The industry has been solving this backwards—jumping straight into automation before building visibility and governance.

At Coherent, we’ve built a platform that follows the right sequence:

Our CTO Peter Roschke explains:

“With Insights, our customers don’t just automate faster—they build trust in the data and models that matter most. It’s about turning hidden risks into actionable intelligence and laying the groundwork for transformation.”

How is Coherent Insights different?

Enterprises have tried two approaches: manual audits and simple workbook scanners. Both fall short.

  • Manual audits are reactive. They’re slow, expensive, and incomplete. By the time the findings are compiled, the picture is already out of date.
  • Basic spreadsheet scanners don’t go far enough. They flag formula errors or metadata but stop short of showing dependencies, usage, or which models drive the business.

Coherent Insights delivers living intelligence.

It applies AI across your entire spreadsheet environment to provide real-time visibility, risk prioritization, and a dynamic inventory you can act on—day one and every day after.

Here's how it works:

  1. Discover – Scan across business units to locate spreadsheets wherever they live.
  2. Catalog – Build a dynamic, AI-powered inventory with ownership, usage, and connections.
  3. Assess – Flag errors, high-risk formulas, sensitive data, and hidden dependencies.
  4. Analyze & Act – Generate documentation, support compliance, and prioritize models for modernization.

And because Insights goes deeper than audits and basic scanners, it can also:

  • Score workbook complexity to flag risky actuarial models.
  • Detect sensitive information like policyholder emails or Social Security numbers.
  • Fingerprint duplicate VBA code to uncover hidden redundancies across teams.
  • Map connections between sheets and workbooks that audits routinely miss.

Get Started

Spreadsheets aren’t going away—and for insurers and financial services leaders, that’s not a weakness. It’s an opportunity. When you stop treating spreadsheets as liabilities and start managing them as living business logic, everything changes.

Coherent Insights turns visibility into momentum.

So audits begin with evidence, not assumptions. Compliance stops being reactive firefighting and becomes proactive control. And transformation projects build on what works instead of what holds you back.

Because once you can see your spreadsheet estate, you can finally shape it.