Data Science in an organisation that doesn't own their data [rant]

Need some advice. I've recently joined an organisation that performs operations for other partner companies (back-office accounting mostly). This organisation takes in data from these partner companies (mostly in spreadsheet or PDF form), performs some back-office accounting operations (not a process I understand fully yet), then sends back financial reports.

At the moment, the aim of our boss (who manages the tech team, data scientists included) is to automate and commercialise these manual accounting operations. The problem is that getting …

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