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 the new issue. No macros. No add-ins. No rebuilding.
Your team stops copy-pasting and rebuilding their Excel reports each period. Instead, it starts to publish them all, each with one command. With the time saved, they can research, analyze, and explain your data. Answer your questions. Apply their curiosity.
And work 40-hour weeks.
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 a manually rebuilt financial package 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 worksheet 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 your published issues—unless you want to modify it—so nothing needs rebuilding. That’s where the hours of saved time come from.
What it replaces
Copy, paste, rebuild.
Most finance teams follow the copy-paste-rebuild (CPR) strategy, which hasn’t changed since the invention of the first 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. That’s 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
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. 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.
Two words to get straight before you ask for it. A flowbook is the real thing, an intelligent “printing press” with the design and the logic inside it. A showbook is a workbook that does exactly what the flowbook does, but with the proprietary parts removed or disguised. The Dow 30 workbook is a showbook. 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 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 it.
Open the showbook and update it, following the short instructions that are included. One command, and the four designs fill with current Dow 30 financial data. Then notice what you didn’t do. You copied nothing. You pasted nothing. You rebuilt nothing. 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, exploration and explanation are for authors of publications, not their executives.
It’s the authors’ job to give executives and managers precisely what they need, when they need it.
When you want to know what your financial data looks like, compared to that of any Dow 30 stock, write me. A trial balance with anonymized data and a chart of accounts is enough to get started.
Who designed this
Charley Kyd
I was a small-company CFO four times over, and a cost accounting manager at Hewlett-Packard before that. I built two accounting departments from scratch and ran the turnaround of a $5 million LBO manufacturer.
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, and the one about Excel dashboard reporting, which I published myself, sold more than a hundred thousand copies. I wrote for Inc. for about four years.
And I spent about a decade building management reporting systems based on TM1 before IBM bought the product.
The EDP Institute is where the Excel Data Publishing Strategy lives now.