From Spreadsheets to a Single Source of Truth for a Precious Metals Business

The constraint

QMC's fragmented workflows created financial and operational risk.

A collector might record the quantity of precious metal received, while Accounting separately encoded the information into a client ledger or reporting record. Every additional manual handoff created another opportunity for an incorrect entry, calculation, or reconciliation issue.

Management also lacked a reliable, consolidated view of the business. Understanding account balances, transactions, settlements, inventory, and historical activity required information from multiple sources.

The company faced several connected problems:

• Repeated data entry and copy-pasting
• Manual calculations
• Reconciliation between departments
• Unclear ownership of changes
• Slow or unclear approvals
• Inventory discrepancies
• Limited management visibility
• Risk of unauthorized transactions

For a business moving hundreds of millions of pesos each day, these were operational control problems, not simply administrative inconveniences.

What we found

The business handles hundreds of thousands of grams of precious metal and hundreds of millions of pesos in transactions each day. At that scale, operational accuracy and accountability are fundamental to the business.

Before Scale XY, QMC's day-to-day operations depended heavily on spreadsheets. The company had previously worked with a development shop to build a platform, but the system remained incomplete and unreliable. Employees continued to treat spreadsheets as the actual source of truth.

Each department maintained and updated its own information. Employees frequently copied data between records and performed calculations manually. A transaction could move from Collection to Deal Management, Accounting, Treasury, and other departments, with each team relying on the information available to them.

That created a difficult operating environment for a business handling high-value transactions every day.

What we discovered

Scale XY first mapped how information moved through the business, from collection through settlement, accounting, treasury, and reporting.

Instead of recreating the existing spreadsheets in software, we worked with QMC to redesign parts of the workflows and remove unnecessary handoffs and duplicate work.

We connected the major functions of the business into one operating system covering Collection, Deal Management, Sales, Accounting, Operations, Treasury, and Management.

The system introduced defined approval flows, role-based permissions, audit logs, automated calculations, and safeguards against unauthorized transactions.

We also changed how employees entered information.

Where a transaction previously required employees to encode the same information into multiple places, the system now carries the information through the relevant workflows.

For example, when a collector records a precious metal collection, the information can flow into the relevant Accounting, Deal Management, and Treasury processes. Calculated fields are populated automatically, and the responsible teams review the results.

QMC also uses AI-assisted data extraction for physical records. Employees can take a photo, have the system extract the relevant information, and review the result before it enters the workflow.

What we changed

QMC moved from department-level spreadsheets to a connected operating system that reflects how transactions actually move through the company.

A collection recorded by one team can flow into the relevant financial and operational processes without repeated manual entry. Employees no longer need to copy information between separate records or manually reproduce calculations that the system can perform.

The company also introduced peer review across workflows. Accounting can review Deal Management transactions, while other teams review transactions within their respective areas.

Approval flows now cover activities across Collection, cash flow transactions, settlements, Treasury, Sales, and other operational processes.

Audit logs give QMC a record of what happened, who performed an action, and when it occurred. The company can also build safeguards into the system to prevent unauthorized transactions.

Management now has a consolidated view of account balances, transaction activity, daily reporting, and historical information. Instead of reconstructing the state of the business from separate spreadsheets, owners can use the system directly.

QMC also has a customer portal that gives the company a more structured way to serve customers and provide access to relevant information.

The clearest sign of the transformation is simple: QMC now relies on the platform as its source of truth.

Technology

Scale XY combined custom software, workflow automation, approval controls, audit logging, AI-assisted data extraction, and a customer portal into one operating system for QMC. The technology connects operational data across departments and gives the business controls that were difficult to enforce through spreadsheets.

What we'd tell you again

For a high-value trading business, operational software has to do more than digitize existing processes.

The system needs to establish control over how information moves through the organization.

That means defining who can perform an action, who reviews it, what information flows to the next department, what the system calculates automatically, and what gets recorded for future reference.

Scale XY's work with QMC also showed the value of understanding the business before designing the system. The company's operations are specific and complex, so the platform had to reflect those realities rather than force the business into a generic workflow.