EDP Institute
Charley Kyd · Former CFO · 10-Year Excel MVP
Introducing theExcel Data
Publishing
Strategy
Design your report once. Then issue one command each period to publish each new issue.
Instead of copy, pasting, and rebuilding your reports each cycle, your team can publish them—each with one command. No add-ins. No macros. Just normal Excel.
With the time saved, your team can research, analyze, and explain your data—in 40-hour weeks.
That’s an extraordinary claim. So you can download an extraordinary workbook that proves it.
Free. Four report designs for any quarter over the past ten years for the Dow 30 companies. One command updates your workbook with new data for them all, which is free.
Income StatementMonthly Issue
AcmeMay
| Revenue | 41.6 | 100.0% |
| Cost of revenue | 22.1 | 53.1% |
| Gross profit | 19.5 | 46.9% |
| SG&A expense | 2.8 | 6.6% |
| R&D expense | 3.5 | 8.3% |
| Operating income | 13.3 | 32.0% |
| Income tax expense | 2.1 | 5.0% |
| Net income | 11.2 | 26.9% |
Source: general ledger · Published in Excel with one command, without macros or add-ins
Income StatementMonthly Issue
AcmeJune
| Revenue | 43.6 | 100.0% |
| Cost of revenue | 22.9 | 52.7% |
| Gross profit | 20.6 | 47.3% |
| SG&A expense | 2.8 | 6.4% |
| R&D expense | 3.7 | 8.5% |
| Operating income | 14.1 | 32.4% |
| Income tax expense | 2.3 | 5.4% |
| Net income | 11.8 | 27.0% |
Source: general ledger · Published in Excel with one command, without macros or add-ins
Income StatementMonthly Issue
AcmeJuly
| Revenue | 45.1 | 100.0% |
| Cost of revenue | 23.5 | 52.1% |
| Gross profit | 21.6 | 47.9% |
| SG&A expense | 2.9 | 6.4% |
| R&D expense | 4.0 | 8.9% |
| Operating income | 14.7 | 32.6% |
| Income tax expense | 2.5 | 5.6% |
| Net income | 12.3 | 27.2% |
Source: general ledger · Published in Excel with one command, without macros or add-ins
Any number of issues from one publication. Any number of different publications.
The idea
Replace manual rebuilding with automated publishing—using normal Excel.
Your team produces manually rebuilt financial packages every period.
The Excel Data Publishing (EDP) Strategy ends rebuilding by flowing your data from internal and external sources, through automatic error-checks, through a management-alert screening system, into your workbook. Your team designs each publication once, in a workbook called a flowbook, which is your “printing press.”
Then one command pulls any amount of data that will fit in your worksheets from the original sources, never from exports somebody saved to a folder last Tuesday. That gives you as much as you want of current data. No macros. No add-ins.
Your source data becomes your single source of the truth.
Nothing about your flowbook changes between each published issue—unless you want to modify it—so nothing needs rebuilding. That’s where the hours of saved time come from.
What it replaces
The end of the copy-paste-rebuild reporting strategy
Most finance teams follow the copy-paste-rebuild (CPR) strategy, which hasn’t changed since the invention of the first computer spreadsheet in 1979. Every period, somebody opens last period’s workbook, pastes the new numbers in, fixes whatever broke, and then visually checks it—if there’s time.
According to Microsoft and Accenture, analysts working that way spend only 15 to 20 percent of their Excel time on analysis. The rest goes to production. Publishing cuts rebuild time by 100 percent. You’ll learn how shortly. So that 15 to 20 percent of your team’s Excel time becomes nearly 100 percent of productive time. So you get 5 to 7 times more of your team’s Excel time to generate the knowledge and understanding you need.
And the world keeps changing, so the analyses and explanations never end. Each source of data gets connected once, but analysts keep writing new queries as new questions come up. And your team has 5 to 7 times more Excel time to answer them.
What the workbook “press” produces
There’s no standard package.
Once your company’s or client’s data flows into your flowbook, the strategy can produce unlimited report and analytic publications. Brainstorming sessions with you, your managers, or your clients can design what you all need, and then your team—your authors—can give it to them.
Clerks publish each issue, not the authors. Training one takes about half an hour, even with no Excel experience: run one command, tell an author if the report page turns red—which signals an error—then save the issue. Your professionals never touch production again.
The workbook and data are free
The Dow 30 Workbook
This workbook proves Excel Data Plumbing is possible.
With one Excel command, the Dow 30 Workbook downloads the most-recent ten years of quarterly and annual financials and ratios for each of the Dow 30 stocks—111 measures for each company for each period. Then the quarterly data flows into four report designs. You can use a slicer to choose which company’s financials to display. The standardized financial data is free.
For this little project,
You’ll see exactly what the flowbook version can report, and where the data comes from.
If you run finance at a company
Send it to your accountants and analysts and ask whether its one-click updating is worth testing on anonymized data in your monthly financial statement.
If you work for a CPA firm
Send it to your CAS and Advisory practice leaders and ask whether it’s worth testing on one client’s—or your own—anonymized financial statement.
I’ll write when it posts, and again as I add new content or answer useful questions. Nothing else, and you can tell me to stop at any time.
After you get the workbook…
Here’s what to do with your workbook.
Open the workbook and update it. To do so, follow the short instructions in the Read-Me-First.pdf file. With one command, Excel will download the data for all 30 companies, which causes the four designs to fill with current Dow 30 financial data. Then notice what you didn’t do. You didn’t copy anything. You didn’t paste anything. You didn’t rebuild anything. And it took less than 20 seconds to update.
Change the company with the slicer, which should take less than two seconds. In practice, you’ll use slicers to interactively explore your updated data. As a general rule, it’s the authors’ job to explore and explain the data, not their managers’ job. And it’s the managers’ job to tell their authors what to look for, and why.
Do you want to see how it runs on your own data? You can update your future financials with one command, and see how your ratios compare to that of any Dow 30 company. A trial balance with anonymized data is enough to get started. And you can de-anonimize the data when I send it back to you.
Who designed this
About Charley Kyd
I was a small-company CFO four times over, and a cost accounting manager at Hewlett-Packard before that.
I ran one Finance department that grew at a 40% CAGR over four years before we sold out to a Fortune 200 company, a VC-funded company that increased its annual sales from $2,000,000 to $25,000,000 in one year, a failed VC-funded startup, and the turnaround of a $5 million LBO manufacturer.
I quit the CFO profession because I needed spreadsheets to run my companies, but I was so burned out after years of 60-70 hours a week that I never wanted to see another turnaround, startup, for fast-growing company again.
And that’s what put me on the path to the Excel Data Publishing Strategy.
I created the first-ever Excel dashboard in 1992 and spent ten years as a Microsoft Excel MVP. Microsoft Press and McGraw-Hill published three of my books. I published one myself about Excel dashboard reporting, which sold more than a hundred thousand copies.
I wrote a monthly column for Inc. magazine for about four years, and for two others that you’ve probably never heard of. I also wrote articles for Management Accounting, Byte, PC World, and World Executive’s Digest.
And I spent about a decade building management reporting systems based on TM1 before IBM acquired the product.
The EDP Institute is where the Excel Data Publishing Strategy lives.