October 20, 2026 How an Irish Firm Replaced Excel With Live Dashboards

Core Financial Systems replaced its ageing ticketing platform in three months with just eight hours of consultancy. Here’s what changed.

Core Financial Systems is an Ireland-based provider of financial software and custom development services, with more than 25 years supporting organizations in the financial sector on Infor SunSystems and related tools. Its support desk is not an internal cost centre — it serves external clients, and its performance is part of what those clients are paying for.

The firm ran ticket management on BMC Track-It! for years. The platform aged out of the requirements around it, and the decision point came when a strategic customer asked for a portal with live visibility into support performance — something the incumbent had no way to provide.

Key takeaways

• In three months, they replaced an aging ticketing platform (BMC Track-It!) with InvGate Service Management — and solved the client demand that kicked it all off: live visibility into support performance.
• A fast move like that was possible thanks to cloud deployment and carrying their existing process over instead of redesigning it, keeping consulting and internal effort to a minimum
• The daily work changed in ways that stick: manual reporting gave way to on-demand dashboards, SLA tracking became automatic, and customers got self-service visibility.

Before

Monthly reporting consumed a full working day. Producing customer-facing figures meant exporting data and fixing it in Excel — not analyzing it, correcting it — before anyone could draw a conclusion. Twelve days a year of skilled time spent on reconciliation.

There was no SLA tracking. Service levels were managed in spreadsheets, which meant they were reconstructed after the fact rather than monitored as work happened.

Customers had no window into their own tickets. Every request for status went through a person.

Replies opened new cases. Threading failed often enough that duplicates accumulated in the queue — each one a ticket someone had to open, read, recognize, and close, and each one distorting whatever metrics sat on top of the queue.

Evidence handling was awkward and search was slow. Attaching supporting material to a ticket took more steps than it should have, and finding a past ticket was slow enough to interrupt the work in progress.

Development requests lived outside the system. For a firm whose support work regularly turns into build work, there was no straightforward way to review them, so they were tracked in separate spreadsheets running alongside the ticketing tool.

The switch: Only 3 months to go-live

The project began in January and went live in early April, using eight hours of vendor consultancy and a small internal team.

Two decisions account for it. Moving to InvGate Service Management in its cloud deployment method removed infrastructure work from the project entirely. And the team replicated its existing process rather than redesigning it, refining the catalog with custom fields to match how the firm actually works but carrying the underlying workflow across intact.

After

Reporting happens on demand. Dashboards replaced the export-and-clean cycle. Customers and auditors review performance information themselves, whenever they want it. The monthly Excel day is gone.

SLA tracking is automated. The spreadsheets that used to hold it are no longer part of the process.

The customer portal exists — the capability that prompted the move. Because the platform is cloud-based, agents and customers log in securely from any location, including mobile, which the previous setup could not offer.

Evidence handling is a paste. Agents drop screenshots directly into tickets.

Development items are tracked in the platform. Custom fields cover them, so the parallel spreadsheets have been retired.

Consultants use the system voluntarily. This is the most telling change. Technical staff who had previously avoided using a support platform at all now use this one regularly — attributed to clear assignments and alerts rather than to any mandate. Consultants working primarily on client engagements are the hardest population to bring onto a service desk, because for them it is overhead rather than a tool. Voluntary use is a better fit signal than a satisfaction score.

Core reports improved resolution times, higher customer satisfaction, and stronger agent accountability since the change, though it has not published before-and-after figures for those measures.

What comes next

With the core setup in place, the team is now looking at workflow automation and AI features, aiming to automate more processes, reduce resolution times further, and scale support as the client base grows without matching that growth in headcount.

That is the deferred half of the original decision. Having replicated its process to get live quickly, Core is now positioned to improve it against real operating data rather than assumptions gathered in workshops — and the customer who prompted the project got their portal in three months rather than waiting a year for a redesign.

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