One Plumber vs Ten Pasters: The $100K Monthly Advantage

Here’s how companies lose tens of thousands of dollars per employee, per month by failing to upgrade their Excel workflows.

SUMMARY: Manual Excel work drains time and talent. This article shows how Excel Data Plumbers, using the EDP Strategy and Excel flowbooks, can outperform traditional copy-pasters by 10x—saving $100K/month per employee through automation, reusable templates, and bespoke executive reporting.

Excel Data Plumbers are more productive than Excel copy-pasters (Pasters) in at least four ways. Those ways combine to make Plumbers not only many times more productive than Pasters, but truly transformative.

Here’s how…

Introducing Excel Flowbooks

By following the Excel Data Plumbing (EDP) Strategy, Excel Data Plumbers set up flowbooks, which flow data from multiple sources to their results—automatically. Because those results—reports, analyses, forecasts, models, dashboards, etc.—are all built using the same Excel Data Plumbing (EDP) strategy, they’re collectively known as reflows.

Flowbooks begin life as ordinary workbooks to which Plumbers add a standardized structure—and then save as a low-level template.

Next, as Plumbers add Power Query connections to various sources of data, and they add an error-checking system to the flowbook, they save those flowbooks as higher-level templates.

Finally, as Plumbers create reports, analyses, and other reflows from those templates, they can use copies of their flowbooks as even higher-level templates.

Here are the four ways that the EDP Strategy can save massive amounts of time, and then use that time in massively beneficial ways…

1. Report-Creation Time

Plumbers can create reflows more quickly than most other Pasters can. That’s because Plumbers can each new reflow with a template in which the greatest possible work has already been completed.

Not only does this process save many minutes or hours in the time it takes to create new reflows, it also enforces a common structure for all reflows. And that common structure makes each reflow more auditable and more easily understandable by other Excel Data Plumbers.

2. Report-Updating Time

Nearly every report that Excel Pasters create for their company sets up a claim on their future time. That’s because very few Excel reports are truly “one-time.”

This is the typical Excel Paster’s reality for most periodic reports: downloading data, copy-pasting it into sheets, patching formulas, correcting labels, and looking for errors. Each new report adds more copy-pasting work and drudgery.

That’s why most Excel professionals hit a report ceiling. Typically, once they’re maintaining a dozen or so recurring reports, their schedule is full. There are no more hours left to give. The tool that once helped them work faster now traps them in drudgery—until they can escape it by finding another job.

The EDP Strategy ends that time-wasting drudgery.

Reflows are designed for easy updating in two ways. First, Excel clerks and interns—who can be first-time Excel users—can update and distribute them easily. Each report takes one command.

Second, because flowbooks can have a Universal Automation Interface, one general-purpose automation program can update and distribute a batch of reflows—consisting of any number of any type of reflow, and each emailed to a different distribution list. Each batch takes one command.

In either case, therefore, a Plumber can build a periodic reflow once and never touch it again.

3. The Productivity Explosion

Flowbooks aren’t merely Excel automation engines. They’re also analytical engines. And that means Plumbers can set up interactive analyses to explore and report vast amounts of data per hour.

To illustrate, a relatively simple flowbook could allow Plumbers to visually explore patterns of data at the rate of more than 1000 data series an hour—and in the context of reference data series.

(Does 1000 sound too high? A Plumber could take 20 seconds to examine an analytical dashboard that displays 6 data series. That would be 18 charts per minute, or 1080 per hour.)

Whenever an interesting pattern emerges, Plumbers can slow down, research it, and explain it—often with the help of AI.

Plumbers also can set up an analytical engine to explore data automatically—for high correlations, perhaps, or extreme trends.

While Pasters often struggle to create just one analysis of one view of static data, Plumbers easily can set up flowbooks to analyze many thousands of views of dynamic data per day.

On other days, Plumbers can spend their time in data storytelling, creating more accurate models and forecasts, developing more insightful reports and dashboards, and so on.

And that work raises the business value of Plumbers exponentially.

4. Managers’ Data Overwhelm

For decades, managers have been overwhelmed by data. So, at first glance, it might seem that ultra-productive data Plumbers will make that problem much worse.

That might be true, except for one new concept: bespoke reporting.

Bespoke reporting for executives refers to customized, strategically tailored reflows that deliver only the most relevant, high-impact insights to senior decision-makers. These reflows are designed to align with executive priorities, cut through data clutter, and support fast, confident decision-making.

To perform bespoke reporting, Excel Data Plumbers rely on two qualities not typically found in most companies’ IT departments:

Their professional training is similar to that of their managers; they speak their manager’s language.
They know what their data means and where to find it.

They also rely on two qualities not typically found in most companies’ Excel users:

They know how to flow data from any available source—internal and external—to executive-quality reflows.
They have the time and energy to do so.

That means they easily can work with executives and other managers as concierge Plumbers. Like concierge doctors, they can work with one executive at a time to deliver exactly the output that each executive wants and needs.

The Assumptions Behind the Plumber Advantage

How do you compare the productivity of Pasters vs Plumbers? It depends on the assumptions you make. Here are my conservative ones:

1. Report-Creation Time
Pasters: Assume 3 hours to create a report.
Plumbers: Assume 1 hour.

2. Report-Updating Time
Pasters: Assume 12 monthly reports, taking 5 hours each, which equals 60 hours per month.
Plumbers: Assume zero hours per month because of clerks, interns, or full automation.

3. The Productivity Explosion
Pasters: Assume 500 hours at half an hour each for 1000 static analytical reports.
Plumbers: Assume 1 hour for 1000 dynamic analytical reports.

4. Managers’ Data Overwhelm
This problem remains unsolved for Pasters, who don’t have the time or resources to address it. Otherwise, managers’ data overwhelm would have been solved years ago.

The Bottom Line
No matter how you choose to combine these four areas, or modify their assumptions, it’s safe to conclude that Plumbers are at least 10 times more productive than Pasters. With a fully burdened labor cost of $10 K per month, one $10K Plumber is worth at least $100K of Pasters—per month!

Conservatively, one Plumber replaces ten Pasters. Realistically, the difference is truly transformational.

Stop the bleeding. Start the transformation.

Learn about the EDP Institute here.