Story Examples

Finance Professional

Is Your Finance Team Being a Business Partner? Or Busy Cranking Reports?

If you're a Finance Professional but you find yourself stuck in the data dungeon, just cranking out reports...I feel your pain.

I am not a Finance person myself, but have worked with some amazing Finance folks in the trenches for more than 10 years.

And every time, it was a bit heart breaking 💔.

Here you are, a highly qualified, highly trained (and often highly paid) Finance professional. But a large part of your job seems to be copy-paste.

To herd the data cats 🐱, collect data from various sources, layer on manual mappings and changes, and work late hours to create that Monthly report.

And then your work starts all over again for the next report.

It's never-ending and it is exhausting 🥵.

But there is hope 🌤️, with Microsoft Power BI.

It is not a magic wand ✨ and things won’t change overnight. But step by step, you can transform your team.

For a long time, Excel has been the Finance Professional’s best friend. And Microsoft Excel is a great tool. With its ultimate flexibility, it's like a Swiss Army Knife. But that has also been its weakness. Any Excel report that I created, overtime it seemed to crumble under its own weight. And we ended up in the much feared “Excel hell” 😱.

Microsoft Power BI (and in fact the Modern Excel, which includes many of the Power BI elements), is a new age tool. It offers

✔️ The flexibility of the old Excel and

✔️ The robustness and automation of the new age!

Take for example the report below, this report allowed us to

1.      Quickly review the Month, Quarter-to-Date and Year-to-Date performance (Actual vs. Budget)

2.      Select and Drill in to see the Full Details for Month/QTD/YTD to examine where the Variances are coming from

3.      Show a Year-End Picture with the latest Forecast (Showing Actual, Budget, Forecast)

And the best part, no one in the Finance team needed to slave away, to generate this report. Power BI helped us connect to multiple sources, clean and remap data as needed, and create a beautiful fully automated Dashboard.

And this was just the start.

I love helping Finance Teams, because I know the deep impact they can have, when

  • They are freed from the tyranny of the Data Dungeon :-)

  • And instead of just cranking out reports…

  • Can become true partners with the Business and an engine for growth!

I would love to talk to you and discuss what may be possible for your Finance team (with a little help from Power BI). Just click below to book a call with me