How Helios Wealth cut their compliance reporting cycle from 6 weeks to 4 days

The brief

Helios Wealth Partners is a US-registered investment advisor with ~$2.4B in assets under management. Like every RIA at their scale, they faced four overlapping compliance regimes — SEC, FINRA, internal SOC 2, and a third-party investor-reporting cadence — each demanding its own quarterly report assembled from five different operational systems.

Their compliance team of three was spending 6 weeks every quarter manually running queries, exporting CSVs to Excel, building pivot tables, and assembling PDFs. That's 24 weeks a year — the majority of two full-time roles. They'd already burned $90k on a Big-4 audit-software trial that didn't fit their data model. They needed a senior business intelligence team that could compress the cycle without breaking their existing internal-controls audit trail.

The constraints

• Five source systems: portfolio accounting, CRM, custodian feeds, internal compliance database, and HR for SAR (suspicious activity report) workflows
• Audit-trail integrity: every metric must be traceable to a raw transaction with timestamp and source. No black-box transformations.
• SOC 2 Type II readiness: their next audit was 4 months out. The new system had to be in their evidence package.
• Read-only is non-negotiable: the BI layer cannot write back to source systems
• Quarterly snapshot immutability: once a quarterly report is published, its underlying data must be locked to a specific point-in-time
• 11-week deadline: had to be live in advance of Q3 reporting

The architecture

Wealth management BI looks like "dashboards" on the surface. Underneath, it's about traceability: an auditor must be able to click a number and walk it back to a raw transaction.

• Warehouse: Snowflake — enterprise-grade auditability with native time-travel and zero-copy clones for quarterly snapshots
• Ingestion: Custom Python connectors for the custodian feeds (no Airbyte connector existed), Fivetran for HR and CRM
• Transformation: dbt with strict tests — every mart model has uniqueness, not-null, relationship, and accepted-values tests that fail the build on any data-quality issue
• Semantic layer: Cube — single source of truth for "regulatory capital," "client AUM," "SAR flag" definitions
• Frontend: custom React 19 + Next.js 14 dashboard, with audit-trail drilldown on every metric
• Auth: Auth0 SAML SSO into Helios' Okta — every dashboard view logged with user, time, and page
• Snapshots: Snowflake zero-copy clone on quarter-end, frozen with a CloudWatch event trigger

The audit-trail design that made the engagement

Every number on a Helios dashboard is clickable. Click a portfolio value, you see the positions that sum to it. Click a position, you see the transactions that built it. Click a transaction, you see the custodian feed line that landed it. Five clicks from any KPI to a raw timestamped record.

This wasn't over-engineering — it was the SOC 2 requirement. Their auditor needed to be able to verify any number on a 60-page quarterly report by clicking through to source. We designed for that from day 1 by adding a _lineage_id column to every mart model in dbt, and storing the source record reference in every Cube measure's metadata.

The 11-week timeline

Total: $38,000 fixed-price, 11 weeks from kickoff to production.

• Weeks 1–2: Compliance interviews, KPI catalog (43 metrics across 4 regimes), data audit, scope locked
• Weeks 3–4: Snowflake setup, custom custodian connectors, raw and staging dbt models
• Weeks 5–6: Mart models with full lineage tracking, dbt test suite, Cube semantic layer
• Weeks 7–8: Dashboards with audit-trail drilldowns, role-based filtering, quarterly snapshot UX
• Week 9: SOC 2 documentation, evidence-collection scripts, runbook generation
• Week 10: User acceptance testing with compliance + IT + auditor walkthrough
• Week 11: Production launch, training, parallel-run against the old manual process for Q3

The results — 90 days post-launch

• Q3 reporting cycle: 4 days end-to-end (vs 6 weeks the previous quarter)
• Compliance team hours saved: ~840 hours/quarter — equivalent to 2 FTEs at their fully-loaded rate
• Annual cost saved: $420,000 in compliance-contractor labor that they'd been backfilling with quarterly contract help
• SOC 2 Type II audit: passed with zero findings related to reporting — auditor specifically called out the audit-trail UX as "best practice"
• Compliance NPS: 9 / 10 (vs 4 / 10 pre-build)

We'd burned $90k on a Big-4 audit-software trial that didn't fit our data. Paisol shipped exactly what we needed in 11 weeks for $38k — and our auditor called the audit-trail design "best practice." That's the highest praise this team has ever heard.

— Chief Compliance Officer, Helios Wealth Partners

What we'd do differently next time

1. Auditor walkthrough at week 4, not week 10. Bringing the external auditor into a working-staging-environment review earlier would have caught two minor audit-trail-design gaps before we'd hard-wired them.
2. Snapshot UX as part of the demo path from day 1. The quarterly snapshot was treated as "back-end magic" until week 8 — the compliance team didn't fully understand the UX until they saw it. Demo it from week 4.

Numbers

• Build cost: $38,000 (fixed)
• Annual infrastructure (Snowflake + Cube + Auth0): ~$48,000
• Maintenance retainer: $3,500/mo = $42,000/year
• Year-1 total cost: ~$128,000
• Year-1 labor savings: $420,000
• Net Year-1 ROI: 228%
• Payback: 3.7 months

Want compliance-grade BI shipped like this?

Book a free 30-minute strategy call. We'll review your data sources, your regulatory regime, and the audit-trail requirements — and quote a fixed price in writing within 48 hours. Or read the related guides: Power BI vs custom dashboard · our BI service overview.