The course is presented in four parts.
First, the course introduces a business case of a “system updating” model that unintentionally includes all the hurdles to prevent fast update from the financial system. The model takes a staff 3+ hour to update the Excel reports for just 1 round of changes from the system, and what’s worse, system changes are twice or three times per day! So how to design the system updating model so that we can get “instant” updates from the system to the final presentation!
Next, the course will demonstrate how the author has overhauled the old model so that it:
o Reduces the system updating time from 2 hours to 1 min, and
o Reduces the presentation updating time from 1 hour to 2 minutes!
Third, the course explains 4 ways of reporting from a Financial System, but focuses on last 2 of them:
o Extract “reports” from the System
o Extract “data” from the System
Last, we demonstrate the 6 Dos and Don’ts in building system-updating and presentation-updating models. Some of the best practices are:
o Do NOT extract “individual report” from the system, opening the can of worms of huge manual work. Rather, DO extract the complete “data” from the system for automated reporting
o Do NOT copy/paste source data into the reporting file
o Do NOT cleanse data manually before calculation
o Do NOT manually key in entity name to generate report
Course Search Keywords
- Data extract
- Drop-down list
- Pivot table
- Slicer
- Paste Link
Prerequisites and Advanced Preparation
● Basic Excel and Power Query knowledge
● Example: be able to open one Excel file and connect to external data files, etc.
● Recommended prerequisite: Power Query (Part 1): Ultimate Data Transformation
Learning Objectives
● Identify 4 ways of reporting out of a financial system
● Understand when and how to cleanse data during extracting data
● Recognize the pros and cons of extracting tables or extracting data from a financial system
● Master 4 best practices of building an “update” model based on financial system
● Discover 2 best practices of building a dynamic “presentation” model based on source Excel file
