Alteryx is quickly becoming a leader in the analytics and data science automation space. However, it’s also being adopted by Finance and Accounting teams. Why?

It plays nice with Excel

By setting the outputs to distinct tabs in an existing Excel sheet, other tabs can reference those outputs dynamically while leaving the layout and formatting intact. This means you can leave your balance sheets and cash flows as they are today, but still get the benefits of up-to-date data.

You can still distribute your files

Financial statements and documents have a broad audience, most of whom don’t use Alteryx. As above, you can have Alteryx do the heavy lifting and then export to Excel. This leaves your model assumptions or inputs in place, allowing CFOs and leaders the ability to plan scenarios and explore sensitivities on their own.

It pulls in from anywhere

Most finance and accounting work involves getting input from at least two different sources. Sometimes those are flat files, databases, prior Excel documents, and more. Alteryx can connect and extract from just about all the data sources that finance teams use and dynamically grab or query the important inputs.

It validates and self-diagnoses errors

Penfield’s best practices in workflow development gives three levels of errors:

1. run-stopping errors (using Alteryx’s Test block),
2. diagnostics (which populate a separate companion file), and
3. validation flags (which output to a review tab in the target file).

It offers data science tools with just a few clicks

Particularly in finance functions, there’s always an appetite for trending or forecasting. Both of these are straightforward applications of data science, and built-in to Alteryx’s capabilities.

It fits finance teams’ workflows

The cadence of many finance teams reporting is periodic (weekly, monthly, or quarterly) and largely repeated (standardized methodology). That fits squarely in the sweet spot for automation: if it were more frequent we’d move it to fully automated server-based workflows, and if it were less frequent it wouldn’t warrant the effort to automate.

We’ve had great success with our Alteryx consulting practice within Finance and Accounting teams, particularly in very large or very complex organizations. Reach out for a free consultation, and see if we can help.