From DND (Dungeons and Dragons) to Financial Controls

[aatalai]

We’ve been using Alteryx in our finance department for over a year now, and have been seeing some great wins in terms of time savings and an increase in accuracy, from generating daily reports to helping with journal preparations.

During our weekly finance team meetings, we had a section called ‘Fun with Alteryx’, where there are more light-hearted demos of what Alteryx can do; in one of those sessions, a virtual DND dice thrower app was demoed (the app is now on the gallery here).

You input the number of dice you want to throw, and the app displays the results.

Inputs of the app:

Output from the app:

This gave a senior member of our finance team an idea, as they used to have to select a random sample for testing for journals. Hence, demonstrating this to them illustrated that Alteryx has a random number (and random sampling) functionality, and we collaborated to move this from a manual process to an automated solution.

This resulted in 30 minutes of time saving a month (of a senior individual), the output being published sooner as no longer waiting for a system report, and eliminated the chance of human error or any bias from an audit perspective.

Conclusion

The two main nuggets I would like to leave with you that I learned from the process are:

• Sometimes great things can come out of things that were meant for fun
• Just because you know what Alteryx can do doesn’t mean your wider stakeholders do. Demo as much as you can, collaborate with them, and see what you can do as a team.