Perhaps you are one of the lucky financial executives whose companies grew methodically, always relying on a unified accounting system. Alternatively, your company may have grown via acquisitions and mergers that smashed together wildly different systems – or your firm grew so quickly that enterprise-level tools were just grafted on top of legacy systems that no one dares replace. Companies with mis-matched systems can face a grueling EOM marathon of copying-and-pasting from the reports and spreadsheets generated by multiple sources. Those with international operations face the additional challenges of currency conversions and different accounting conventions around the world.
This time-wasting EOM crush can be eased by using Alteryx to automate your currently hand-crafted (and therefore error prone!) consolidation processes.
With Alteryx as your consolidation tool, your U.S. and international divisions can send their EOM spreadsheets and reports in whatever format they were using before the need for consolidation arose. A customized Alteryx “workflow” will read them directly, regardless of formatting. For ingesting spreadsheets, it doesn’t matter if the division puts explanatory material at the top before the actual data begins. The numbers you need may be in columns labeled “sales” or maybe “revenue” or perhaps labeled with the French word “Ventes.” The actual data could show up as strings or floating-point numbers or integers. Alteryx will automatically convert everything to the unified standards that you require.
Even at more granular levels, many EOM irritations can be solved. Your divisions may have adopted shortcuts in their reporting, say truncating long GL codes down to just the five or six digits they actually use. Or they might apply the GL code for “shipping to customers” to costs that HQ has labeled as “incoming freight.” Alteryx smooths everything into the right category, automatically, every month. Our clients have turned days-long hand processes into a few seconds of an Alteryx workflow run.
What’s more, every manipulation of the data is documented and handled the same way every month. It doesn’t matter if your bookkeeper or accounting spreadsheet expert is out sick, and Ned from sales is attempting to fill in. The Alteryx workflow has encapsulated the expert’s knowledge for perfect replication every month.
In the sample workflow shown, several of the time-saving and error-eliminating tools are shown. One such tool goes through every row of data to make sure it conforms – you can see the “beaker” of the Formula tool at the end of the first box. It examines every GL code in the data and expands it up to the full length, if it’s been truncated for convenience by a reporting unit. In the second box, the green tool takes care of a reporting unit that combines GL codes and GL text descriptions into a single field. The tool splits them into two new and distinct columns.
The bottom line is that you don’t have to wage epic bureaucratic battles to resolve inconsistent reporting – no need to call your boss to lean on their boss to get everyone to report the same way. You can push a button and entries for “Aufwand” become “overhead” and Euros become Dollars – both translated and FX-adjusted. It’s like noise-canceling headphones for accounting: all the irritations just fade away.
Contact our experienced CTO, Chris Williams, to have him appraise your current system and how it can be automated. There’s no charge for the consultation, and Precision Analytics will complete the first assignment on a fixed-price basis – no worries about unexpected costs! Reach Chris at 503-347-6425 (West Coast time) or [email protected].
The bottom line is that you don’t have to wage epic bureaucratic battles to resolve inconsistent reporting – no need to call your boss to lean on their boss to get everyone to report the same way. You can push a button and entries for “Aufwand” become “overhead” and Euros become Dollars – both translated and exchange-adjusted. It’s like noise-canceling headphones for accounting: all the irritations just fade away.
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