Challenge #397: Auto Insights Special Edition – Financial Insight Spend Analysis

[AYXAcademy]

The Academy Team is pleased to present our first challenge of the Auto Insights Weekly Challenges: Special Edition! 

To participate, you will need access to Auto Insights, which is part of the Cloud Platform. If you do not have AAI already, you can take this opportunity to start a free Cloud Trial. Additionally, remember that you can access interactive lessons in Maveryx Academy for extra assistance.

Now, let’s dive right into your first challenge!

At Built Things, a construction company with offices across the USA, you are a financial analyst, reporting directly to the finance manager. The Finance Team recently gave the green light to the Engineering Department's investment in materials for a new construction project. However, the team was surprised when the invoice exceeded the approved budget significantly. In response, the finance manager decided to lead a review of the company’s expenses and requested your assistance in preparing and presenting a report to the CFO.

The dataset you will use to solve the challenge is Finance Month-end Analysis. This dataset shows the monthly spending incurred by Built Things. Each row represents a company spend and has information about the vendor, site location, product description, project, order, and contract details. The date range is from December 2019 to November 2022.

Task:

Create a Mission (KPI Deep Dive Report) using the preloaded Finance Month-end Analysis dataset (available in the Datasets tab) using the Spend column as your Measure.

In your report, address the following questions about the company’s expenses:

1. How much did the spend increase from September 2022 to October 2022?
2. What were the top three drivers of this change?
3. Add a Breakdown (Project Name). Which project had the highest increase in spend?
4. For the project identified in the previous question, what are the top three products that Built Things spent the most on?
5. What is the relationship between spend and the number of contracts? Select the most accurate implication of this insight.

If you find any other interesting insights, make sure to highlight these.

Your final task is to use Magic Documents to create a PowerPoint presentation for the CFO, primarily focusing on cost reduction. Remember that you are presenting to an executive, so keep your presentation professional!

Solution:

To share your solution, please upload your PowerPoint presentation to this post.

Posting your solution to the challenge will count towards earning Weekly Challenge badges!

Enjoy solving this first Auto Insights challenge!

Video Solution:

[benjimoser]

Nice Challenge. Here is my PowerPoint Presentation. Looking forward to get some more Alteryx swag ;)

[AkimasaKajitani]

My solution!

Fun challenge!!

[Yoyocuter]

A smart tool. Great to learn something new.

[OllieClarke]

Here's my solution

Spoiler

first time properly playing with Auto Insights. 

[TonyAndriani]

Are these going to count towards badges and credit on the leaderboard for weekly challenges? If so, there's no way I'm going to be able to keep my ranking. I would really prefer you have a separate track for non-Designer challenges.

[gawa]

Agreed with @TonyAndriani .

As I'm using AACP as a free trial, if I miss to solve the series of these special challenges during the free trial period, I'll leave these challenges unsolved forever.

I would like to at least have an alternative to solve these challenges by using Designer as usual, even if compromising about not entering to a drawing. 

[Matteop9]

Here's my presentation!

[DavidJohnson]

Here's my presentation.

[Kenda]

Spoiler