Clearview Advisory Group is a US-based strategy and financial advisory firm serving mid-market clients on multi-year planning and capital allocation. Engagements require forecast models grounded in current macroeconomic reality — documents built for CFOs and board members. James Merritt leads quantitative modeling across client engagements.
Three government datasets, no consolidation layer
The deliverable was a 3-year financial forecast template anchored to live US macroeconomic benchmarks — CPI, real GDP growth, and interest rates. The macro data lived in separate government-published CSV files. To build the baseline, Merritt needed to extract post-2020 rows from each file, compute year-over-year growth rates for CPI and real GDP, and merge all three series into a single coherent table before any client-facing work could begin.
The post-2020 environment added non-linear complexity: the inflation surge, the most aggressive Federal Reserve rate-hiking cycle in four decades, and GDP swings from sharp contraction to strong recovery meant flat-line assumptions or pre-2020 trend extensions would produce a materially misleading baseline. A current-data anchor was non-negotiable. Done manually, this alignment exercise spans several hours before the forecast template is begun.
Energent.ai became the consolidation engine
Merritt uploaded the three macroeconomic CSVs directly into Energent.ai. The agent handled the full pipeline:
- Scanned and validated all three uploaded datasets before proceeding
- Executed Python to extract the latest post-2020 readings from each file
- Computed YoY growth rates for CPI and real GDP, then merged all three series into a single consolidated CSV
- Delegated dashboard generation to a subagent, producing an interactive overlay chart covering the inflation surge, rate-hiking cycle, and GDP volatility on a unified timeline
- Authored a structured markdown 3-year forecast template with baseline figures, YoY rate tables, and a three-year projection scaffold
- Verified file structure and rendering integrity before final delivery
No manual merges. No formula rewrites. No separate charting tool.
Regime-aware data, not just prettier reporting
- Real computation on real files. The agent executed Python against the actual uploaded CSVs — not placeholder data. YoY growth rates came from the source readings, not approximations.
- Post-2020 coverage as a default. Post-2020 rows were extracted across all three series, capturing the regime breaks that make current-period forecasts materially different from pre-2020 extrapolations.
- Single session, full stack. Ingestion, consolidation, visualization, and template authoring ran sequentially within one session. The dashboard and template drew from the same consolidated baseline.
- Format flexibility. Files from different government sources with different column structures were handled without manual pre-processing.
How James Merritt runs it
- Upload the three macroeconomic CSV files into the Energent.ai session.
- Agent extracts current-period readings and computes YoY growth rates.
- Consolidated CSV is generated and available for download.
- Interactive overlay dashboard is produced by a subagent.
- Structured markdown forecast template is authored and verified.
- Both files are downloaded for client delivery.
Three client-ready artifacts, one session
- Consolidated macro baseline: a single CSV combining CPI, real GDP, and interest rate readings — YoY growth rates computed for CPI and real GDP, interest rates carried as level readings
- Interactive overlay dashboard: a unified chart covering the post-2020 regimes — legible to a non-specialist finance audience
- Structured forecast template: a formatted markdown document with baseline figures, YoY rate tables, and a three-year projection scaffold, ready for client handoff
Work that would have consumed several hours of manual data assembly across three separate government files was completed within a single working session.
"The template went straight to the client's CFO team as the working document for the multi-year planning cycle. That's the bar — good enough for a CFO team to use directly. It was." — James Merritt, Senior Strategy Consultant at Clearview Advisory Group