Why is 37 Act reporting so hard to manage with spreadsheets?

The annual cycle depends on many data sources, reviewers, assumptions, reconciliations, and final outputs. Spreadsheets can calculate, but they do not preserve ownership, evidence, review status, or institutional memory across the whole cycle.

Which teams usually feel the pain?

Administrators, finance teams, reporting managers, operations leaders, actuarial liaisons, audit coordinators, employer reporting teams, and board support staff all feel different parts of the same workflow problem.

37Act Guide

Why annual 37 Act reporting becomes a fire drill

Common 37 Act reporting pain points for pension administrators: source data gaps, exception tracking, audit evidence, GASB support, and board packet pressure.

Audit and board packet materials for a county retirement reporting cycle

37Act is built around a simple thesis: county retirement teams do not need another generic dashboard. They need a controlled annual reporting workspace that helps them manage the messy path from source data to defensible outputs.

A pension fund administrator may already have a pension administration system, finance system, payroll source, actuary, auditor, board process, and shared drive. The failure point is the connective tissue between those systems and people.

The administrator’s job-to-be-done

The person landing on this site is likely trying to answer questions like:

Are all employer and payroll files in for the fiscal year?
Which contribution totals have been reconciled?
Which member data exceptions are unresolved?
Which files support the actuarial valuation request?
Which schedules support GASB 67 and employer disclosure materials?
Which workpapers and approvals support the audit trail?
Which exhibits are safe to include in the board packet?

37Act should speak to that administrator directly: we help you run the reporting cycle, not just visualize pieces of it.

Continue to the integrations approach, implementation plan, and 37 Act reporting guide to see how the workflow becomes a product.

Administrator reality

Most reporting risk hides between systems, not inside one system.

A retirement administrator may have the right source systems and still lack a governed workspace for the reporting cycle itself.

Current state

What breaks down

!Payroll and employer files arrive in different formats, with different timing and different review owners.
!Actuarial requests, audit questions, finance schedules, and board exhibits pull from overlapping but not identical source data.
!Exception status lives in email threads, meeting notes, shared drives, and personal spreadsheets.
!The team has to explain the same numbers multiple times to different reviewers.
!Every fiscal year starts by recreating last year’s process from memory.

With 37Act

What 37Act organizes

✓A fiscal-year workspace with expected sources, owners, due dates, and status.
✓Validation and exception queues for missing files, mismatched totals, stale assumptions, and unresolved questions.
✓A shared evidence trail for actuarial, GASB, audit, finance, and board outputs.
✓Role-based notes and approval history so leadership can see what is done and what is blocked.
✓Reusable reporting cycles that preserve institutional knowledge year over year.

Pain points

The problems a 37 Act reporting workspace should solve first.

These are the practical friction points that make the product feel essential to administrators and reporting teams.

Source file uncertainty

Which employer, payroll, member, investment, accounting, actuarial, and audit files are expected for this fiscal year — and which are still missing?

Late exception discovery

Contribution mismatches, member status anomalies, stale assumptions, and unexplained adjustments are often found after schedules are already being drafted.

Reviewer bottlenecks

Finance, actuarial, audit, operations, legal, and executive reviewers need different context, but teams rarely have one shared review queue.

Evidence recreation

Audit support and board packet documentation get rebuilt every year instead of flowing from a living evidence binder.

Board packet pressure

Administrators need a confident public-facing packet, not a last-minute assembly of screenshots, manually updated tables, and disconnected narratives.

Staff knowledge loss

When a key reporting analyst leaves, the logic behind last year’s work often leaves with them.

Turn the annual reporting fire drill into a mapped operating model.

Start by mapping the source systems, recurring outputs, exception points, review owners, and packet deadlines that make your annual cycle difficult.

Request a pain-point assessment