Hapax – case studyBoard reporting

The board pack that answers back

The board pack and AI analyses from the case study above, shown side by side across twelve months. Pick a month to see what the numbers say and what the analyses found.

Paju Consumer Products Oy is fictional. Every figure is scored against a held-out answer key.


i · The pack

Twelve months, 327 flags, zero causes

The deterministic layer reads the ledgers and flags every threshold breach, mechanically and correctly, without a word about why. Pick a month. January is where most boards would start worrying.

Try this – step through the months and watch the tiles and table update. Every red cell is a genuine threshold breach; the pack still will not tell you why any of them happened.


ii · The six clusters

What the pack says. What the agents found.

Three independent agent runs received the pack and the raw tables (never the answer key) and had to deliver a verdict on each recurring flag cluster. A correct “stand down” counts for as much as a correct alarm.

Try this – each row sets the pack’s flag beside what the three analyses found. The strip shows where the flag fires across the year. Open the evidence to see the tables and figures each run cited.


iii · The marking

Marked against the answer key

The stories were planted and the answer key stayed out of the agents’ reach. This is the designed outcome as delivered, including what no run found.

Real story No story Pack raises an alarm

S1 – material costs read as input inflation

The pack is right to flag it. The cause is mix and promotional pricing.

Explained with evidence – 3/3

S4 – the January cliff

Seasonal, in line with budget and prior year.

Stood down, with evidence – 3/3
Pack stays calm

S2 – DSO behind a one-off · S3 – bought growth

Every headline looks fine. Both had to be surfaced unprompted.

Surfaced – 3/3 *

Everything else

Three mundane one-offs and a structurally optimistic budget.

Correctly ignored. No false alarms.
* The honest misses, present in the data, claimed by 0 of 3 runs

S3’s two sharpest exhibits went unclaimed by every run. Three accounts sit above an 18% discount in December 2025, and the volume bought per promotional euro is ~38% weaker in the second half. Both were provably present and neither was surfaced. A one-pass investigation finds the mechanism and misses the best evidence, and without a held-out answer key nobody would know where that ceiling sits.

Discount rate per named account · Dec 2025
Volume per promotional euro · 2025

Three blinded Claude (Opus) agent runs inside Claude Code, identical pinned briefing, transcripts audited. Every file each run opened is listed, and none touched the answer key. Runs were not cost-metered; no cost figures are claimed. Zero false positives and zero incorrect cited figures survived adjudication across 30 findings.


iv · Your reporting

What this would look like on your reporting

A monthly board pack’s variance analysis is deterministic and, once built, cheap to run. What costs time is the story behind each flagged number, and an agent layer can go looking for it cluster by cluster without waiting for someone to open the receivables appendix. It does not find everything unprompted. Two of the sharpest pieces of evidence in the Baltics story went unclaimed by all three runs here, a miss the write-up covers in full.

Read the long-form case study · Code and dataset · Contact Hapax