Ditch Excel for FP&A Data Consolidation & Validation

Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) enterprise professionals are chargeable for mapping out an organization’s monetary future. They rework firm objectives into actionable plans by analyzing the present state of economic administration affairs, then take the time to create a roadmap plan that particulars easy methods to attain the vacation spot. 

Creating these plans require ingesting large quantities of information assets, aggregating, cleaning, and standardizing that information, after which performing evaluation on the completed product. The insights which are a product of that evaluation are the FP&A analysts’ inventory and commerce. Everything that leads as much as that perception is a way to an finish.

Yet most FP&A analysts & administration spend the overwhelming majority of their time on that preliminary work—reconciliation, evaluation, cleaning, and standardization, which I’ll consult with right here collectively as information preparation.

That’s as a result of Microsoft Excel remains to be the go-to software for performing all of that information prep. And whereas Excel is a really succesful software for sure operations, it throws too many roadblocks within the company monetary planning and evaluation analyst’s path to be thought-about enough, not to mention environment friendly.

Below, I’ll concentrate on three of these roadblocks, together with a short rationalization as to why Paxata is the plain substitute. Finally, I’ll hyperlink to a free book useful resource detailing why Excel has outlived its usefulness in the case of information preparation for contemporary enterprises.

1. Excel isn’t sensible sufficient to assist 

Imperfect beings that we’re, even the very best analysts can’t detect each single anomaly, particularly once we’re coping with hundreds of thousands of rows of information. AI, however, doesn’t miss a factor. 

Lucky for us, we don’t should be good. Corporate FP&A analysts—and analysts of all stripes, for that matter—can now depend on AI to catch what we miss. But to do this, you’ve received to leverage instruments that really have synthetic intelligence baked in. For duties like these, Excel simply received’t reduce it anymore.

Profiling information

The laborious means. Say you’re getting ready funds vs actuals. In Excel, you create a pivot desk to match gross sales efficiency by area and salesperson. In this state of affairs, you’ll always change forwards and backwards between your pivot desk and your filtered information to search out duplicates and outliers, change values, or take away errors. And ultimately, you continue to solely have a partial understanding of what you’re . 

The straightforward means. Paxata’s Filtergrams—a mix of filters and histograms—present a visible illustration of your information earlier than, throughout, and after each transformation. Not solely is the info you’re on the lookout for in a single view, it’s additionally embedded in an interactive, point-and-click interface that makes detecting anomalies a breeze.

Cleansing information – Financial Planning & Analysis Process

The laborious means. In Excel, you’ll must create nested formulation for even easy logic to scrub your information.

The straightforward means. Paxata takes care of the heavy lifting concerned in cleansing information in two methods. First, Paxata’s clever cleaning algorithms may be utilized utilizing built-in pure language processing. Next, Filtergrams hone in on particular values to use your logic. 

Combining & Blending Data – Financial Planning & Analysis Process

The laborious means. Excel requires you to manually scan each column of your spreadsheet, maintaining a psychological tally of them as you go. Then, you’ll must carry out VLOOKUPs to merge them into your dataset. The greater the info set, the trickier and extra error-prone this course of will get. (In truth, analysts spend roughly two-thirds of their time trying to find information.)

The straightforward means. Maybe you’re getting ready a money move forecast and must merge two information units. Paxata’s be part of detection algorithms can determine candidate columns resembling these that might type the idea for becoming a member of two disparate information units. 

2. Excel requires coding data to edit and reuse workflows 

Paxata information each transformation you make, each step of the way in which, so you’ll be able to simply re-run transformations in a particular order or time later. 

Reusing workflows in Excel requires recording information macros or coding them in VBA. But let’s say you’re snug coding macros. What if you might want to swap the order of two of the transformations in a given workflow? 

Paxata handles this elegantly, permitting you to reorder every step in a easy, visible interface. You may even clone all the course of to reuse it on a distinct information set. 

For FP&A people, this may be invaluable. Forecasts & options are wanted frequently, in any case. Sales patterns, headcount, and territories change, and every new piece of information breaks the mannequin.

But because of Paxata’s point-and-click interface, you don’t must recode a VLOOKUP to replace your company mannequin. Just drag the brand new information into the suitable discipline, re-run the workflow, and also you’re performed. 

3. Excel doesn’t go away an audit path

I discussed that Paxata information each transformation. That not solely makes for straightforward reuse, it additionally leaves a comprehensive audit path. It’s laborious to overstate the influence this will have organization-wide. 

Recording each transformation means anybody with the right instruments, assets or permissions can entry the info and see every transformation carried out of their browser. 

But that’s simply the beginning.

Analysts may also annotate every step, permitting colleagues to, as Nationwide Business Information Architect Mark Marshalek put it, “start to see the mindset of the user who created the project or data environment.” 

Then there’s ClicktoPrep. Within every challenge, you’ll discover a ClicktoPrep hyperlink. Copy and paste that code into your BI software of selection (like PowerBI). Selecting that hyperlink from throughout the BI software takes you to the info prep challenge that reworked the info into the data visualized in your BI software.

The extent of this information lineage in Paxata means nobody ever has to guess the way you arrived at a particular conclusion. It’s all specified by black and white.

Moving to the meeting line mannequin of information prep

As we’ve seen, Paxata can cut back (or nearly remove) tedious information preparation processes for almost all of FP&A analysts work. Budgets vs actuals, forecasting, income and expense reporting, product profitability stories, and compliance reporting are ushered into the twenty first century with Paxata’s self-service information prep. 

When the time-to-insight is lowered to a fraction of what it was, the impact on enterprise organizations is profound. A easy query from management that beforehand took days or perhaps weeks to reply can now be delivered the identical day. 

FP&A (and finance usually) is just not ditching Excel anytime quickly. But for gathering, aggregating, reconciling, cleansing, and standardizing information, Paxata eliminates as a lot as 80 p.c of the handbook work that goes into these processes. 

I’ve solely highlighted just a few of the various causes FP&A departments depend on Paxata to supercharge their output whereas saving their sanity within the course of. (I haven’t even touched on model management or collaboration.)