Financial Closing Reporting

Output for Business Intelligence Tools: Retain granularity

Reading Data - Budget Tables:

By store, SKU, and month

Join Actuals and Budgets: Perform variance analysis

Visualization & Data Output:

• Plot data in a bar chart

• Send report to various tools

Financial Variance Analysis

This workflow demonstrates a typical variance analysis report created by Finance teams.

• Sample data provided represents raw Finance system accounting information (transactional), while budgets are arranged in table formats as they may be when exported from a planning tool.

• Following the cleanup and preparation of the data, data is output into multiple formats for consumption by the audience (Excel, Tableau, PowerBI shown here, and can also be written out to various databases too).

• The process identifies corresponding Excel actions a user may take to perform the same task (in red where it is a manual process in Excel, in green where it can be somewhat automated using Excel formulas).

This process can scale to many months of actuals, and millions of input data rows will not require additional manual work. Changing to a database input is the simple replacement of the Excel Reader node.

Reading Data - Actuals:

Raw data from an Accounting System

Data Transformation: