A finance team maintains a monthly revenue restatement by exporting a lakehouse table to a spreadsheet, applying adjustments by hand, and uploading the result. What is the principal risk?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
You're leaving the restatement logic in one person's head and a sequence of clicks. If you can't reproduce, audit, or correct those steps, the numbers aren't trustworthy. Codify the adjustments and that whole class of problem goes away.
Full Explanation
The correct answer is the one saying the adjustments exist only in one person's manual steps, so the output cannot be reproduced, audited or corrected reliably. Manual transformation has no recorded definition. There is no way to reproduce a prior month, no lineage from source to restated figure, and no review of the logic because the logic is not written down anywhere. For financial reporting, that combination is a serious audit exposure.
The option claiming spreadsheets cannot represent decimal values accurately enough for financial figures is incorrect because numeric precision, while a genuine spreadsheet concern, is not the principal risk here and is easily managed.
The option claiming the upload will fail because the lakehouse does not accept externally modified files is incorrect because uploading modified data is technically possible - which is exactly why the practice persists.
The option saying the risk is limited to the time the manual step takes each month is incorrect because it reduces a correctness and auditability problem to a scheduling inconvenience. The time cost is the least of it.
For the exam, the argument against manual transformation is always reproducibility, lineage and auditability rather than effort.