From the course: Copilot in Excel: AI-Powered Financial Planning & Analysis
How Copilot in Excel helps FP&A
From the course: Copilot in Excel: AI-Powered Financial Planning & Analysis
How Copilot in Excel helps FP&A
- [Lecturer] As financial analysts, managers, and directors, we often face challenging and time consuming tasks. Since we work with so much data across so many functions and projects, these tasks can be error prone, and these errors can be enormously consequential when we let the wrong insights or bad data guide our decisions. How do some companies cope? Well, they often hire more people to do more work, or they train people to do the work better, or they migrate to more powerful software. But what if Copilot and other AI powered FP&A tools could perform these tasks more efficiently, more accurately, and more reliably so we didn't have to hire more people, so that we don't have to take lots of training or migrate away from Excel altogether? Let's explore how we can through five examples, data consolidation and formatting, reporting and dashboard management, financial modeling and forecasting, scenario planning, and financial analysis. Data consolidation and formatting can be a time consuming, extremely tedious and error prone process. Without automation, we're forced to manually gather data often from multiple sources and expose ourselves to missteps along the way. But with Copilot, you can automate data consolidation, ensuring that the data is accurate and current. Leveraging Copilot together with Power Query, which can easily clean, reformat, merge, and position data from various sources, we can save significant time and reduce the likelihood of errors. Reporting and dashboard management like data preparation is essential, but can be very manual and tedious. Copilot can help streamline reporting and dynamic dashboard updates by automating some of the underlying processes. Financial modeling and forecasting are two core duties for many FP&As. We can utilize Excel's own built-in AI capabilities to solve and automate complex calculations, and offer analytics on the data. Copilot and other AI powered tools can assist us in generating models based upon historical data. And based upon new assumptions, we can forecast future trends. This allows us to focus more on insights and drivers than on manual, number crunching, and modeling. Scenario planning takes financial modeling and forecasting a step further. Rather than accepting the models and forecasts as is, scenario planning is the act of considering what ifs. For example, what if we were to increase marketing expenses by 8%? Or what if we were to reduce direct costs by 2.5%? While we could certainly do this manually, we can also leverage AI tools to help us get it done. And last but certainly not least, is financial analysis. Whether we're looking for insights, signals, or variances, Copilot, analyze data and other AI powered tools can help us do this through simple instructions rather than having to perform the complex calculations, macros or templated approaches. If you don't believe me that this is all possible, well, you're in for a treat because that's what this course is all about.
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