Related Posts
Bowl Leader
Hope everyone has a fun and safe Halloweekend!
Conversation Starter
Visual Storyteller
Bowl Leader
Come thru with that .0000009% conversion rate
Visual Storyteller
Additional Posts in Accounting
Is the CFE pretty easy?
Beyoncé - too much for me.
New to Fishbowl?
Download the Fishbowl app to
unlock all discussions on Fishbowl.
unlock all discussions on Fishbowl.
I’ve used Alteryx in both public at PwC and in industry at a Fortune 50 company. I’ll preface by saying Alteryx is a great tool but not the end all be all. If you’re working with huge data sets that Excel struggles with or processes that are manually performed on a frequent basis (think daily, weekly, monthly) then there is usually opportunity to gain efficiencies using Alteryx.
If you’re in public consider the types of data you receive from a client. In my experience that was pretty limited to trial balances, fixed asset reports and other smaller detailed reports. I had some clients who would send the trial balance and fixed asset reports in really weird formats that would require manual data manipulation to clean up before putting them into a work paper. I created client-specific workflows to clean those things up. Depending on what tax prep software you use there may be opportunities to convert your data into an import template format to upload directly into the software. In my experience a lot of people in public don’t consider the cost/benefit when implementing Alteryx because the frequency you use this data from clients can be as little as once a year. And if for some reason the format of a data input changes then you need to reconfigure your workflow. People often times use Alteryx just so they can say they used it.
If you’re in industry there are many more opportunities to use Alteryx in my opinion. If you’re working with general ledger reports and running queries for things there are ways to extract that data directly into Alteryx through SQL/ODBC connections. From there you can run whatever calculations you need off that data in your Alteryx workflow. It’s much more viable to completely automate certain processes.
In industry and use it for a few things:
1) completely automated an 800,000 row subpart f calc that looks at same country of sale and same country of manufacture test based on multiple manufacturing sites
2) extracting of data into an import/template based format
The way I design my workflows is to do them side by side as I'm doing the calc the first time, test the second time, and run it independently thereafter. It helps if it's something you do every quarter the same way.
My team just started using alteryx to combine all tax return excel working papers, then upload the one combined file into taxprep to generate all tax returns at once. It is expected to save us a lot of time
We use taxprep in Canada to prepare tax returns
For business returns or 1040s?
State apportionment and reverse audit are two areas we use it a lot. I also use it anytime I need to combine multiple spreadsheets - marketing lists, etc.
I agree that python can do what Alteryx does. The difference is the learning curve for non programmers. Alteryx allows people to quickly pick up it up and understand what’s happening vs. raw python code.
The selling point of Alteryx is its a visualized reviewable repeatable process and super intuitive. It can be applicable to any repetitive data transformation tasks
Followin
Same
Also following
1. Manipulating client info for quicker/easier import to our systems.
2. Using it to automate standards analysis such as State Residency Filings.
3. Use the reporting tools to create static "dashboards" we can send to clients to give them an overall snapshot of their filing footprint.
Here are just a few examples:
1. Data processing (combing multiple Excel data into one) for one consolidated data
2. Workpaper prep - manipulating data in a way to organize (instead of manual entry, you will just copy the output and paste into the workpaper).
If you want to hire Alteryx expert in tax, I am available. Please feel free to send me a message.
Have you ever gotten firm approval to do contract work? That could be a nice side gig
I think the firm investing in these tools is extremely dumb. You could do everything Alteryx can in Python and it's a shame that it isn't a focus of the firm. I guess it makes sense since Python doesn't have a sales team telling PPEDs how it could help the business and the PPEDs themselves get scared if they need to understand a line of code.
Someone can review an Alteryx workflow without have a technical background in it. For Python, I don’t know a manager or senior manager I’ve worked with ever that could look at code and review it.
I agree, all the tools in Alteryx are just code with a ribbon on it. That is what you are paying for. But in a high pressure, fast paced environment, Alteryx can deliver results with out a user having to learn as much.
Was it the Digital Now tax lessons you completed OP?
Making models, but honestly cleaning horrible client data