Why Your FP&A Team (Probably) Needs Power Automate

Summary

In this edition, we will be covering the following items:

1. Understanding the challenges of manual processes in FP&A

2. FP&A use case for intelligent automation

3. Getting started with Power Automate for your team

Manual, Repetitive Tasks Are Distracting Your Team from Strategic Objectives

FP&A teams have to balance multiple competing priorities. Manual, repetitive, time-consuming tasks take the team’s attention off of their strategic priorities and can drain morale. Teams spend large amounts of time working on tasks required just to keep up with the rhythm of business.

1. Manual Reminders: Budgeting cycles are kicked off manually, with teams having to follow up across the organization to ensure all budgets are submitted. Accounts receivable spends time looking for past due accounts and following up manually.

2. Manual Approvals: Managers and leadership are emailed the latest budgets, and data and have to manually find them in their inbox and approve or reject them with commentary.

3. Manual Data Movement and Upload: Teams spend time moving data from one location to another, navigating through SharePoint folders and document versions.

4. Manual Data Parsing: FP&A professionals spend time collecting data from various locations, cleaning them up, and uploading them to the correct repositories.

5. Manual Alerting: Teams spend time alerting key stakeholders and business partners about various metrics and sending reports with underlying data.

Liberating Your Team with Power Automate

Power Automate is a low-code-no-code automation tool built on the Microsoft Power Platform. It supports numerous AI-powered functionalities that allow business teams to easily create intelligent solutions to support their needs. Used correctly, this tool can plug into your existing Microsoft infrastructure to enhance and automate processes.

1. Automated Reminders: Teams and business partners are automatically notified when the budgeting cycle is kicking off and are provided a link to their action items.

2. Automated Approval Requests: Approval requests are automatically sent via Team/Outlook to the appropriate stakeholders. All approvals are centralized in simple tools like Power BI and MS Forms.

3. Automated Data Movement: Files are automatically collected, transformed (cleaned up), and moved to the appropriate repository. Teams do not have to “chase” the right files and perform repetitive tasks with them.

4. Automated Data Parsing: Power Automate is used to kickoff processes with other Microsoft tools to clean and transform data, eliminating manual processing.

5. Automated Alerting: Stakeholders are automatically notified when KPIs breach pre-specified thresholds and receive automated reports, summarizing specific data at a regular cadence.

The FP&A Automation Roadmap

Getting started with Power Automate is straightforward and can be a very exciting time for the team. Most teams will have very obvious pain points that they will want to be prioritized and addressed.

1. Audit Your Current Processes: Your team can take an audit of the costliest repetitive and manual processes that are taking up the largest amount of their bandwidth. Including the team in these discussions will secure their buy-in and help you crowdsource the richest opportunities.

2. Prioritize and Triage: After conducting an audit, work with your team to pick the first use cases to tackle. For your first use case, you are looking for low-hanging fruit: opportunities to make large time/effort savings with a minimally complicated solution.

3. Simplify and Redefine: Take the time to reimagine what processes might look like in a target state. Work with your team to make sure you are not just automating ineffective processes but redesigning them to be both effective and efficient.

4. Build Your Flows: Get started building your first Power Automate flows. Remembering to start small with your first use case, your team can build momentum and will be empowered to start reimagining their workflow and processes.

Power Automate in Action: An Example

Let’s explore a simple example study to highlight an example of how Power Automate can be used to save your team time.

1. Current State: Your team receives a standardized file from a vendor every month. Each month, your team has to take this emailed file and drop it into SharePoint. From there the team has to clean up the file and transform it into the appropriate format to upload to your supply chain tool (SCM). It is then manually uploaded by an offshore team. The team regularly has to address data quality issues due to the manual keying of data.

2. With Power Automate: Power Automate automatically “picks up” files from the specific vendor, drops them into SharePoint, and kicks off a Power Query transformation to clean up the file and check for data quality issues. Power Automate can then also kickoff an automated process to upload/write the data to the appropriate database and notify users when the process is completed.

Action Items

Take some time to think about what automation tools your team could benefit from:

1. What manual and time-consuming processes are currently draining your team’s time and effort?

2. What repetitive tasks is your team performing on a regular cadence?

3. What other strategic initiatives could you empower your team to focus on if they were free from this kind of task?

4. Where do you have an opportunity to reimagine your processes and take a fresh approach with an automation tool?

5. Where do you want to retain a human touch? Where is it important to implement controls and governance?

Free Resource

Check out our Power Automate YouTube playlist for free resources to get your team started with Power Automate.

In the Next Newsletter

We will learn about how and why great finance leaders insist on creating systems to run their teams.