In this insightful episode, host Kevin Appleby welcomes back Dan Stockdale, a GrowCFO facilitator and financial modeling specialist. Dan shares his journey from management accountant to financial modeling expert across diverse industries including media, advertising, defense, and retail. Currently working as a contractor for London Business School and creating online courses for finance professionals, Dan offers valuable insights on automation tools that are transforming finance departments.

The conversation explores how Power BI, Power Query, Power Pivot, Python, and Microsoft Copilot are revolutionizing financial analysis and reporting. Dan emphasizes that while learning these tools initially requires investment, the practical implementation in day-to-day finance operations delivers significant time savings and value creation. He highlights that as organizations collect increasingly larger volumes of data from diverse sources, finance professionals who can leverage these automation tools become indispensable to their businesses.

• Dan explains how Power BI enables finance teams to automate month-end reporting and create dynamic visualizations that tell compelling financial stories
• The conversation covers the growing importance of Python in Excel for predictive analytics and how it’s becoming more accessible to finance professionals
• Dan discusses how Microsoft Copilot is changing financial modeling, though he cautions about the need for human oversight when using AI-generated code
• The discussion explores how automation tools free finance professionals from routine tasks, allowing them to focus on delivering insights and strategic value
• Dan shares his plans to continuously update his courses as Microsoft releases new AI and automation features, ensuring finance professionals stay current with technological advancements

• Dan Stockdale on LinkedIn
• Kevin Appleby on LinkedIn
• GrowCFO Mentoring

• 0:11:44 Dan introduces his background as a management accountant who specialized in financial modeling across multiple industries
• 0:14:09 Dan discusses the learning curve of automation tools and the importance of practical implementation to solve business problems
• 0:22:48 The conversation covers data sources and the challenges of departments using Excel spreadsheets as databases
• 0:27:38 Discussion about the speed and efficiency benefits of automation tools compared to traditional manual processes
• 0:33:51 Exploration of the time-to-value proposition of Power BI and the challenges of data preparation

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