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Tag Archive for: Power Query

Avoiding Hidden Risks: Data Integrity Best Practices with Excel Power Query

June 1, 2025/1 Comment/by Sarah Schlott

Here’s a dirty little secret of finance: the more polished the deck, the more likely there’s duct tape holding the data pipeline together. I’ve seen it. Flashy dashboards. Perfectly aligned KPIs. Everyone nodding in the boardroom—until someone asks, “How was that calculated?” Cue the mad scramble: Slack threads, undocumented Excel formulas, a stale mapping file […]

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The CFO’s Guide to Scaling Financial Data Prep: From Manual to Automated Workflows

June 1, 2025/1 Comment/by Sarah Schlott

Let me give it to you straight: most finance teams are flying their planes while building the wings. And that’s fine—until you hit turbulence. I’ve worked with scaling companies where the first $10M in revenue was built on ad hoc Excel reports, stitched together the night before the board meeting. And hey—it worked. Until it […]

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How to Build an Audit-Friendly Financial Data Pipeline with Excel Power Query

May 31, 2025/1 Comment/by Sarah Schlott

Let’s start with a truth no one likes to say out loud: audits don’t fail because the numbers were wrong. They fail because no one can prove they were right. I’ve seen it too many times. You’ve got a perfectly accurate board deck. A forecast that matches actuals to the penny. But when the auditors […]

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10 Common Financial Reporting Tasks You Can Streamline with Power Query

May 31, 2025/1 Comment/by Sarah Schlott

Here’s a hard truth they don’t tell you in finance onboarding: most “financial reporting” is glorified janitorial work. You know the drill. Dump the GL. Copy and paste into five different workbooks. Filter out the junk rows. Reformat dates. Fix that one column that always comes in as text instead of numbers. Then pray your […]

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5 Ways Excel Power Query Can Automate Your Financial Data Prep

May 26, 2025/1 Comment/by Sarah Schlott

Let me start with a confession: I’ve burned more hours on manual data cleanup than I care to admit. The kind of hours that feel like you’re trapped in a Kafka short story—endlessly copying, pasting, sorting, and cross-checking a mess of numbers that don’t want to behave. The irony? Most of this work is invisible. […]

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Sarah Schlott

FP&A consulting, forecasting, accounting support and finance strategy for CFOs and growing finance teams.

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