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Billing in excel for Finance

[Music] well hey everyone Welcome to our last co-pilot webinar of 2024 boy what a ride it has been and I can't believe the holidays are among us and what better of a subject to go right into it than to talk about something real light and lighthearted which is co-pilot for finance now while I'm partially kidding hopefully you're going to have some fun here we're going to get a lot out of it and especially you're going to get to meet Joey martowski our Director of Finance here at manage solution who gives us a lot of insight on his day-to-day World in terms of planning budget for 2025 and what are the tools that are going to be really effective and efficient for him my name is Jeff lizerbram I'm a pre-sale Solutions architect here at manage solution and let's get right into the agenda like I said you're going to meet Joey we're going to have a little talk so to speak on how we could do better planning on budget strategies and Reconciliation of statements and things like that let's dig into also is co-pilot really worth it you know what it's a pretty expensive license but what is the ROI potentially that you could get out of it we're going to review that then we're going to go right into the demonstrations of not only co-pilot for Excel and the really cool things he could do in terms of budget strategies and forecasting but we're also going to look at co-pilot for finance which is a different tool and we're going to show how it's different and what you can do differently in it now given that we're on Zoom you're always welcome to hit the Q&A button to ask your question just type it out and we can respond during the webinar and after the webinar if you want to come off of mute and raise your hand go ahead and hit the raise hand button and come off a mute and we can take your questions live right here so without further Ado let's get right into the content but real quick before I forget I'm going to launch a poll and it'll have a series of questions on your day-to-day habits and perhaps how you view budgeting and some of the needs that co-pilot or AI can help you out there so I look forward to those responses and we'll review those a little bit later with that said I'd like to introduce you to Joey martowski who is our Director of Finance here at manage solution and Joey you know what before I lose my voice actually why don't you go in and tell us a little bit about yourself and your role here at manage solution sure so my background before manage solution was I've worked at uh Vari iy of companies kind of different sizes shapes and industries uh and a you know variety of different positions but uh all accounting and finance uh have done pretty much every aspect of that uh from you know your day-to-day accounting functions to um you know Financial Planning and Analysis for large multinational corporations um and here at manage solution uh just run the Finance and Accounting this topic and as you know it's Focus on co-pilot and AI in general and how it's transforming everyone's roles to try to do things a little bit more efficiently uh maybe a little bit in more modern ways maybe some automation hey wouldn't that be nice I I wanted to ask you like in your day-to-day uh you know activity as you're punching through numbers and looking at finances what are some of the biggest challenges that you're facing in terms of like Financial budgeting or forecasting or maybe even you know trying to find the time to put together a well-developed like report that you might have to show yeah that's I think on that last one you kind of Hit the main point and it's a it's a struggle I think everyone has in finance where you know you spend uh so much of your time in spreadsheets I mean you know there's so many great tools out there now from powerbi to whatever your Erp system might be um you know great system systems but at the end of the day you you still spend a significant portion of your time in Excel in spreadsheets um trying to put together reports that uh I think the way I always like to put it is um I don't like having charts and graphs and reports that are not actionable I think we need useful information I think that's the biggest thing uh that that I like to focus on and I think that uh it is a big struggle I think when we talk about challenges you know you might have a big set of data and you say all right what do we need to what does this say what is actually telling us and how do we put it into a form where we can read it and not just for for me for a finance person I'm sure that I'm going to be able to look at something a little bit differently than let's say we want to take it to you know operations or we want to take it to sales or we want to take it to the CEO of a company or a board of directors or something like that it's all going to be different everybody's going to want to see something a little bit differently or at least understand the data a little bit differently um and I think that becomes a bit of a challenge because you can sit there with the same set of data and you find yourself making 20 different reports kind of try trying to tell the same story in just different ways that everybody else can understand it and that's just timec consuming I think that's one of the biggest challenges honestly so repetitive tasks is that what is that what is happening is that kind of the large part of your your day-to-day Life In terms yeah and I think no matter who you are you end up doing that from you know if you're a a an accounting clerk somewhere uh to CFOs of companies I know uh yeah end up spending a significant portion of your time in Excel and going through reports and data and trying to make it look the way you want it to look and to see what you really want to see um and I think that yes it is oftentimes repetitive tasks how much of your time in the tools that you're using is spent in Excel versus other tools other productivity tools um what would you kind of Define you know how you them good good question uh I would say I think it it used to be that you'd spend 99% of your time in Excel um I think a lot of companies have have started going um to more bi to power bi is a great tool um I think a lot of companies are starting to head that direction but even still at the end of the day you still spend 75% of your time in Excel I think uh you know you're when you export reports from any system uh whether you're using a you know a QuickBooks or you're using one of the bigger you know an oracle whatever it might be whatever system you're using you're exporting most of the time into an Excel file where you can put together reports that are useful for you even if you can customize I know every system is has all of their tools and they're great but as much as you can customize those reports you still end up doing a lot of export and working in Excel whether that's you know reconciliations or just however you want to display your p&l files and whatever it might be that you have there there's just so many different ways that you need to produce reporting and a lot of times no matter what the systems are you still end up in Excel so are are you finding that when you're exporting things out of other uh applications or systems that right now like you end up with a RW Excel file maybe it's just a CSV file or something that is just non formatted and then you kind of have to could build it from scratch do you do you find yourself kind of doing that yeah I think that's that is a significant portion of the of of Finance work I think it what happens is whether it's an export of data or you're just trying to build something from scratch even and sitting there manually keying things in uh I think at the end of the day yes A large portion of the time is here's the output of data uh number one is it formatted right to where you can do anything with it and two does it even have all the information in there that you need I mean oftentimes again no matter how good a system is you're going to export something and you're going to go shoot I want to show you know gross margins of whatever it might be and and you end up doing some of your own calculations anyway in Excel how often are you uh leveraging things tools maybe it's an Excel itself uh but to leverage tools to forecast or do whatif scenarios are are you uh uh are are things like that part of your day-to-day Outlook and trying to figure out what what is happening next to our finances here yeah I think uh again a lot of people are starting to use powerbi and and tools like that a lot more um I I do for sure I like a lot of them um especially if you have you know a a large set of data variety of data sets that you might have um for sure you can use your bi tools for that um but I will say again when it comes to forecasting budgeting especially um you know at the end of the day I still end up using Excel because i' I build my own formulas I make it so that you know here's your input input cells you can pass that along to different groups in the company or department heads and say here you go you know sales please fill in these different you know uh key inputs for me and I can spit out all my outputs based on that whether that's you know spreading your budget month to month even it's something as simple as that or you know what departments they need to hit or where it go you know it's those kind of things again I I still think you end up using Excel more often than not um uh do you foresee like any help and maybe there's an easy button where you know hey write me a formula that will help me calculate out this what if scenario or forecast is that something that you feel like could help yeah I think so I think uh one of the things I recently watched an old commercial from the 90s I think uh when Exel first came out and they were showing how great this is look at how great you can build your own little table and have it and it was awesome it was so funny to look back on it and I think wow it's it's so much better now there's so many things we can do there's so many formulas but the the issue is now it's gotten that far and you can do so much there's a lot you have to do you have to you know know a lot of formulas but also just I mean you're you're keying in formulas all day right you're you're trying to build a structure of a file how do you want that chart to look you know how do you want things to look it's it's uh you spend a lot of time doing those tasks as cool as it is that you can now uh it still takes a lot of time you know you're dealing with a lot of sensitive information uh obviously there's a lot of in intellectual property that we have here but you might have to maybe perhaps follow other you know compliance requirements so that we keep our insurance up you know to date in terms of cyber security risk um do you have any concerns about using AI uh generative AI tools uh within your daily work task you know I will say uh sometimes for sure I think if it's uh if it's something that's a a third party that you know maybe I I think trust is a big thing for me uh if if I know that it's a company that that supports your business and really you know their their business is your business they want to make sure you grow you're safe you're secure I mean I I do like it's you know part of why I like working with Microsoft right like we know they're a very trustworthy company they the things that they do they're not uh your data is not going all over the place they're they're making sure that that everything's secure I think um you know if I'm using an AI tool and I I do know that there's a lot of um add-ons for Excel and things like that where I just I don't know I I would find it hard to use one unless I had a good relationship or history with the company that I knew um things were secure because it is you know it is concerning I do get it there's H there's a lot of data Gathering that happens for you know and not not necessarily for nefarious purposes right people are trying to improve their systems and trying to help for sure um but at the end of the day there are a lot of things that are it's sensitive information you do not want that to be outside of your world well I know that one thing that really helps our customers whether you're in finance whether you're in HR U any role really within the organization is that there seems to be a use case of co-pilot for just about anyone and one of the areas that I frequent quite a bit with our customers and when we're training and providing some uh adoption to co-pilot and make it more effective is we go through a scenario Library here and this is a really nice resource anyone can get to it by going to adoption. microsoft.com and I wanted to kind of drill into uh some of the areas and if you follow along with me uh there's an area here um under functional areas called finance and what you can do is you could pull down the little section there of finance and see there's a lot of different scenarios listed right y i I was just curious um I well let me let me ask you this is there any anything that kind of sticks out in terms of what might match something that is very common along your uh line of work yeah I mean honestly a few of these uh if we're being completely honest I'd love to uh uh accounting document evaluation is great Financial Insights I think is huge intelligent sales forecasting um probably some of my favorite I think reconcile financial data might be one of big in the future too yeah well why don't we go through a few of these um in fact uh let's start with Financial Insights let's just dig into that one for example let's look at the steps here um maybe let's talk about step number one if you see that payment reconciliation yep and and the theme here and actually as you scroll down a little bit more or look look at the other little uh kind of objects there where it says co-pilot in Excel co-pilot for finance Studio agent you know these are all different tool sets within co-pilot as you can tell it's not just Excel I mean yes you are the Director of Finance you know um and you use Excel quite a bit but as you can tell co-pilot is like pretty much everywhere so let's talk about it uh payment reconciliation um I'm sure you just mentioned like there's times where you might have to export some data do some Rec reconciliation there um one thing I wanted to mention here was that co-pilot for finance it shows it's in preview but quite frankly if you simply go to co-pilot microsoft.com using your organizational ID um you know you can actually start providing some prompts to look at documents look at financial documents that are in your purview uh and do analysis on it just outside of excel so um I was just wondering I'll just kind of spark a question here you know you mentioned you use other applications but are there other applications within the Microsoft apps that you're commonly using as well for example PowerPoint PowerPoint power powerbi I think is one yeah you mentioned powerbi quite a bit and actually that's a great that's actually a very unique uh aspect of this uh because powerbi is totally integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem it has its own co-pilot capabilities I tell you co-pilot is like embedded everywhere whenever you're using a tool uh but yeah tell me a little bit about maybe a day in the life of a payment oh or something like that no it's a good one uh we do have so so this is actually a really good example for us uh right now we have uh two different systems that we use you know uh operations and then our you know an Erp system that we use for for our financial reporting and accounting and everything that we do um that and then we have to reconcile all of our our payments with uh connect wise is what we use right now so we'll pull out the data from one system pull out the data from the other one and have to make sure that those All Connect uh you know there's scenarios where some of those payments come in automatically other ones need to be entered manually uh so as you can imagine there's a lot of room for discrepancies whether it's a duplicate payment or something that was missed it can happen uh a lot and that needs to be done all of the time for us I'm going to pull up another uh just one more scenario that we could walk through um let's see what might be interesting here intelligent sales forecasting yeah like that okay all right you kind of like that topic right yeah I want I want to forecast sales yeah that's right so uh from this perspective as we uh look down on on the steps that are involved here look at this there's not any other tool other than co-pilot for Excel that's listed here so maybe let's walk through uh to see if this might match something that you might do or want to do on a day-to-day uh or I should say have available for you um within your role so cleansing the data you've already mentioned that you know you might receive some raw data files coming from other systems and you're you're providing some uh ways to prepare that data right yeah for sure I think a lot of what happens is you get a a data whether it's in a a table format or or not you need to format it as such so you can create your own reporting um it's I mean a lot of it is just yes cleansing the data making sure the the um the exports that you have can actually fit into whatever it is you're trying to show whether it's you know like a sales forecast like this or what has been sold or where you're at currently and where you're at in the sales cycle on certain things and um yeah I mean f first and foremost you have to make it so that it's uh usable yeah absolutely and then uh that step two analyzing sales patterns now when I look at a a big spreadsheet with just lots of numbers I have no idea what is telling me right away uh I mean before co-pilot or before AI uh or maybe you're not using AI to its fullest yet because it's still fairly new in its infancy yeah what are you doing like do you see patterns just naturally as a finance expert or do you have to do certain things to see patterns yeah I mean at the end of the day it's you one way or another you still have to C put together some sort of reporting that makes sense to you um and I think that's where oftentimes you do get a little bit stuck right you start creating a report but it's a blank canvas in reality once you have a a big set of data you need to figure out what you need to find so uh for me it's always you know what are we looking for um so for example if we said we do want to see sales patterns whether it's timing or like I said where how long it takes to close a deal or whatever it might be you need to make that determination up front but then you're going to spend some time and you're going to figure out okay what you know points of data on this table or this this set of data that I have what what shows me what I need to see here uh so then you start to put together a a you know whether it's chart you're putting together or a you know even just a little you know a um a summarized table of things uh you're still doing formulas you're you're running old school pivot tables and you're trying to do the do things that way um and that's the I think that's a timec consuming uh thing to do I think um if you could ask co-pilot to do some of that for you that would be fantastic and I feel like we are get and and and it definitely is providing that I think one thing that really helps is as I'm uh punching through data in the role that I'm in um what's nice about having a co-pilot next to you is that it gives you other suggestions so once you get some data that you want it's going to say well have you thought about looking at this in a different way or did you want to analyze maybe a different category within this uh chart and so that that always kind of lends itself to getting a lot more more questions out you know to you know get as much knowledge out of the data as possible uh might be something helpful huh yeah for sure and I think it's uh like I said a lot of times you you end up doing a pivot table or whatever it is um and each time you do that you're sitting there you're creating a new table or or you're you're trying to format things and and essentially redo the work you just did to try to show some of that other the other insights you're looking for um and it it would be nice to not have to sit there for a half hour or whatever it is every time you have to do that uh to figure out how you want to you know try to copy what you just did reformat it and do it the same way you add it but with the new new information you're trying to pull out um I do think that that co-pilot has the ability at least it really looks like we're going to be able to use it to uh ask specific questions and it can do it repeatable and it can pull a table out or create a chart for you that you like um and just do it again with the different information that you have you can have uh consistent but but you know usable data I think is what you're looking for yeah absolutely uh what I like about it um which I'll I'll show in the demonstrations coming up is that when we um want to ask it to provide certain data so maybe we want to add a a new column that analyzes uh you know certain areas I I mean I'm just being very general but I'll show you some specifics in a moment but um what I like about it is that you can actually hover over over the example that it's giving you and it'll just kind of like put that little column there temporarily you hover your mouse off of it it disappears so it allows you to either determine if if this is data I want to commit to the Excel data there or you know that doesn't look right you know so it gives you a definitely an out in case AI gets a little wonky sometimes because uh we all know it's still learning yeah it's still learning H but you know what I I think that's true with the human too I mean if you're sitting there and you put in a formula on something and you say this is what I'm trying to do and then you put a column in your table and then all of a sudden you go yep that wasn't necessarily what I was trying to do there uh I don't you know I I think yes it's very true that we can I think in both scenarios that can happen but it's that it pre-fills things in for you yeah that's right well good I'm I'm just going to wrap it up with uh just you know one more question and that's how do you envision AI uh to be kind of helping in you know someone who is in finance like yourself what does that look like in the in the future um are you scared are you excited I think uh I don't know I think I'm always excited about something like that in finance I think from an accounting standpoint we as as great as like I said there are a lot of great tools for us out there uh you know whether it's powerbi or you know even just an Excel excel's gotten great uh it really has but uh there's still just so much manual work that you put into it that I I think you know done right we could probably take a lot of the the the repeated tasks that you continuously do out of the equation um I think just for for when it comes to what AI is really going to do for Finance and Accounting I mean I think there's a couple couple of ways to look at it I think you know quick wins I think there's probably some things pretty quickly everybody could probably start doing uh I know when you pull data out and you go ah now I've got to put together these reports every single month or week or whatever it is that you do you can just start asking co-pilot to do those things I do think that there's quick wins there uh that we can find I mean now today uh and I think that's great I think long term there's more and more that we'll figure out that's that we're even better at I think that we can kind of ask it to do you know more of the the slightly more complicated tasks and trying to determine things and honestly it does understand a little bit of what you're asking already it's not it's not the worst thing in the world already I mean already it's it's it's heading in the right direction and I do think there's some knockout effects too I think uh it it'll condition Us in Finance and Accounting to maybe change the way we do things a little bit for for the better for me because I think it's better that we format data the right way you know if we really want to look at large sets of data I think it's good to get in the habit of putting it in a format that's closer to a database something that you can use and and create repeatable reports with and instead of you know I think often times I've seen you know I've seen it all from an accounting side but people will pull data and they start adding columns everywhere and trying to make their own little formulas and do things a million different ways and it's not necessarily repeatable and and that way and you know if it's a monthly task you're redoing that every month and it's crazy and it's not always the same you can't go back to the last you have to go back and look and see and they're all different and I think it'll help us be more consistent with the way that we do things so that we can use it and we can use it properly and save our a ton of time in the in the meantime so I think there's a lot of things that we can do in the long term that that are going to be great well that that's awesome and thank you so much by the way for your time and providing your Insight uh and what you do dayto day and how you see uh co-pilot and AI uh kind of coming along in that area um and I'm glad we're um you know we're talking about a very light subject right you know just up before the holidays Finance accounting numbers right yeah so hope hopefully hopefully yeah hopefully you don't have any heavier conversations than than this subject matter during the holiday season but uh yeah really appreciate your time and uh you know I'll catch you around the office or wherever soon awesome thank you so much well I don't know about you but I always find it helpful to hear from people who work in finance and are using Financial tools daytoday and talking about how Ai and co- pilot can really benefit what they do on the day-to-day basis for better efficiency and better value overall and speaking of value is co-pilot really worth it well let's take a look at some of the numbers from a study that was done this year actually and Forester actually did a study on Microsoft co-pilot for SMB and what they found was that through the usage of co-pilot the was an up to 6% increase in net revenue over the last year up to 20% in operating cost efficiencies and savings and 25% acceleration in being able to do things like new higher onboarding that's a lot of things that are due to some of the automation that co-pilot brings so a lot of Great Value there and what the study found was that there was an astounding 353 Roi on the return on investment of using co-pilot pretty amazing now it is showing there was some investment done $271,000 in investing in some co-pilot tools and implementation and things like that that's definitely not a small ticket to have but when you think on the return on investment and the savings and say like that $1.2 million in uh benefits that you get out of it there's a lot of potential itial with it something uh else I wanted to show you was that co-pilot's early impact definitely had a lot of impact as you can see there's some pretty significant percentage numbers here in terms of faster case resolution if you're in customer service if you're in sales there's higher Revenue in marketing there's conversion rates that are much higher than usual Human Resources Finance legal you can see that there's definitely a trend upward because of the efficiencies that co-pilot brings so there you have it lots of Roi to be had from that perspective hopefully the benefit of having co-pilot and the ROI value that it provides makes sense now why don't we take a look at a real world situation with co-pilot for Excel and if you're using Excel in your daily life let's see if there's some Roi value by seeing the following [Music] demo at this time let's dig into some of the co-pilot for Excel capabilities and especially if you're in the situation where you need to understand a budget forecast and do some analysis on some past uh maybe some quarterly results uh from your organization here I have in front of me I have a a spreadsheet that it's a CSV file it was exported perhaps from my general ledger system Erp maybe even QuickBooks and what I'd like to do is I'd like to leverage co-pilot to do a lot of the analysis for me a little bit easier than I can alone so let's put this in motion and we'll take a look at uh some of the data here now the fact that it's in uh kind of unformatted data and also that it's sitting in a spot where there's no autosave capability co-pilot is most likely going to complain making sure that I save the file somewhere in one drive SharePoint somewhere where uh autosave is going to be turned on but also I need to make sure that instead of a CSV format I need to convert it into an actual Excel format so once I go through the process of saving the file as an Excel format you'll see that Co pilot actually turns on right away on that right side there now as I look through the data uh one thing that really helps co-pilot along is if we can convert it into a table and the later versions of co-pilot don't necessarily need you to do this much anymore but it's still really good practice to convert your data into a table where it's going to be much more easily understandable by co-pilot so we'll go ahead and we'll insert it as table and uh let's take a look at the data so far now one thing uh that I'd like to do is I like my data looking a little bit nicer and so the first thing and this isn't really Finance related but this is more co-pilot related but I'm going to ask it to actually split those project names into separate column so I can maybe do some better sorting from that first name last name type of thing so let's just start there um and I'll go ahead and gen generate that prompt as you can see it's generating the formula that is going to help me create two separate columns for first and last name so from there that's pretty cool now I can go ahead and if I hover my mouse over insert columns you'll see that before I even commit it I can kind of see what it looks like if I like it I'll go ahead and insert it I could always hit undo if I don't like it well what can we do next from here well because I like my data in a certain way I just want to maybe rearrange the columns a bit so there I go now the thing is the profit margin column column J is kind of in a a decimal point so I want to convert it into percentage so that it properly reflects that and that's easy enough I think everyone for the most part knows how to form form at you know their data into uh percentage into currency and things like that and that's what I'm doing right here I'm just asking co-pilot to do it instead of me actually going through the menu items to actually apply all those changes so uh easy enough um still you know quite helpful but let's get to the better parts of of the situation here so one thing that I I've seen is that uh the q1 revenue and Q2 Revenue what I'd like to do is compare them with each other is one higher than the other is one lower than the other so I'm going to ask it to do a comparative analysis and what it's going to do it's going to spit out a formula it's going to spit out a summary and it's going to allow me to insert a column if I want so let's take a look at the results here so you can see that there's a summary there's the formula that I could use I can even use that formula myself if I wanted to add it in there but even easier let me go ahead and hover the mouse over insert column so I can see what it looks like and if it looks good looks pretty good to me I'll go ahead and insert that now I'm of the type where I like to add a little bit color to the data that I'm looking at so uh Excel as you probably know has additional formatting uh and we can actually add some color to highlight those areas for example highlight those areas which contains higher so there we go we have all of the data in there which will highlight anything that shows which quarter was higher pretty easy enough but let's go a little bit further now so between the q1 revenue and Q2 Revenue what was that percentage difference now it's a relatively easy math problem but you know what I sometimes have to think about it and especially in Excel you kind of have to put that in a formula co-pilot does it super quickly we can look at the percent difference between q1 and Q2 results you can also see that some of those results are in the negative territory and maybe I want to actually highlight those areas that are in the negative territory so I'll again use condition formatting for anything that is showing in the negative and as it looks at the data it'll comprehend it and it's going to display in red highlight that uh anything that is in the negative it's in a red highlight right there oh perfect all right I'm I'm on my way I'm doing some analysis of the data but now I need to go into the projections so I know what q1 is I know what Q2 was um and I want to project what is it going to look like perhaps in quarter three of 2025 well here we go we can actually ask it to estimate what that uh difference might be um what that uh you know pattern might be in quarter three by applying a formula that it knows about based on what I prompted it so I can look at those results I can see that Q3 Revenue uh results you know looking good for the most most part um and I'm going to say let's highlight those areas in green that are probably showing like the top five uh you know top five performers in uh in that area so I can actually see hey that green category are uh you know top five performers another thing that Excel does really well is multiple things at once so in this case I'm highlighting Rose and orange I'm defining as the development project and I'm applying conditional formatting uh to areas where you know hey maybe I need to show that the development project is in a certain category that is displaying you know certain areas uh to make it stand out so I could easily locate that data going even a little bit further let's go ahead and actually show insights now this is uh probably what co-pilot and C is best known for if you simply ask it to show insights about the data it's going to find that first Insight that it thinks is pretty important so if you just want to get a quick summary of the q1 versus Q2 Revenue comparison there you go uh very easy to do but even better we can go in take a look at all the data and we can actually say you know what I want to add all insights to the grid so co-pilot is is going to analyze all aspects of that data and it's going to put together some meaningful data maybe it'll put together some unmeaningful data you have to kind of check it yourself but as you can see there's a lot of great uh graphs and Analysis that goes into this that you can put into say like an executive report now one cool thing is that you can show breakdowns in a specific area so here I'm asking it to show a break down of designed uh revenue between q1 Q2 and Q3 or what's predicted in Q3 and we can go ahead and generate that chart quite easily and really in the background it's creating a pivot table and it's creating a pivot chart as a result so you know long are the days where you have to know how to put together these pivot tables together quite easy now really cool thing here I want to demonstrate is that that if you wanted to predict what happens if I increase the percentage from 5% to 6% profit margin and what would that look like in say like a a quarter four analysis so here's what here's what uh is happening um it's predicting that Q4 revenue and the problem sometimes it doesn't always know how to create like the uh the new columns but it's going to give me the formulas at least so now I have the formulas to work with to provide the prediction and what I'm going to do in this case is I'm going to take those formulas and I'm going to clear out the data from what I had previously with a a 5% margin and I'm going to go ahead and apply those formulas to show a 6% margin in what it potentially could be in Q4 so here we go we I'm simply just adding columns I'm utilizing those formulas that co-pilot showed me uh what to do and there you have it you have some a good Q4 Revenue predictions uh for the coming year in 2025 so a lot of capabilities um there's even a lot more capabilities coming with co-pilot especially with python running in the background as your code where you don't have to be a coder to do this it's going to do a lot of it for you and it'll be a really great assistance uh for any kind of Financial Manager any kind of CFO uh role in your [Music] organization now that we've covered copilot for Excel and its ability to do budget forecasting what is copilot for finance and how is it different well let's take a look and see how it is different and first off I wanted to give a shout out to minda Tracy from my online training Hub who's allowed me to show this content and be able to demonstrate co-pilot for finances capabilities so the differences really are that first off co-pilot for finance is still in preview it comes in the form as a plugin so a plugin is something that you can use from your add-ins button in Excel to be able to download plugin and you'll see it there in the marketplace to add into Excel the nice thing in many ways is that copilot for finance is supported in older versions of office so office 2016 if you're still running that you can use copilot for finance because it's a plugin that supports that version now the tool is a little bit different in a way that it leans heavily on data reconciliation so we're going to show you how that applies in this case now when you're also running co-pilot for finance you're still going to need some Microsoft 365 licensing because the data that it uses is going to work best when it's stored in one drive and SharePoint and it's going to be able to use the AI features that are part of the co-pilot family now every day someone who works in finance is probably working with payments received sales invoices things like that and it is very timec consuming to be able to reconcile those areas so copile for finance helps quickly identify those variations maybe there's multiple payments received on a single invoice and this is where it really saves a ton of time so we're going to take a look at this demo and let's get after it so this might represent a day in the life of Someone Like You who might be in finance and you're working with sales invoices and payments received and we want to do a little reconciliation because we're finding some discrepancies here now as you can see from the information I have uh this again might have come over from a CSV file but there's 30 entries of data in sales invoices and 34 entries of payments received so something is off and our job is to figure it out and reconcile it now I sped up the video because I'm putting this in formatting of a table we need table formatting just like we did in co-pilot for Excel to do a better job co-pilot for finance is right there in the upper right when you add it as a plugin and to add it as a plugin you're going to actually go to addins and you're going to search for it in the marketplace and it's real easy find it and then you can add it in there ingly so let's click on reconcile data uh right there in copilot for finance and you're going to see it recognizes the worksheets that I have open sales invoices and there's a table called sales and payments received and there's a table called receipts so let's click on next now that we've uh uncovered that and it's going to create some rules here and these are mapping rules for what we need in order to determine kind of like the source and destination mapping of what we're going to reconcile here now it did a pretty good job at understanding what I need to uh reconcile but if you wanted to go in and manually change those settings you can go ahead and do that manually so that you're ensuring that it's looking at invoice ID versus invoice ID as well as amount and amount received and that's really kind of how they're listed in the tables that I have let's go ahead and click on next now that we have our mapping done here and it's going to run a Reconciliation Report and in really almost no time it found out quite a few discrepancies and it's listed it and organized it in unmatched transactions potentially match transactions and really kind of fully matched transactions now let me go ahead and undock this you can undock it you can move this co-pilot for finance window wherever you'd like um and right there it shows you the report that it generated I'm going to show you that a little bit more later but let's go ahead and highlight the areas of how it organized the data here so as you can see there's unmatched transactions let's highlight that area potentially matched and matched transactions so I'll go ahead and expand all the data here now I'm not too concerned about match transactions that's great I know exactly what areas that it got matched but I do have a problem especially with unmatched transactions there's definitely something different there so we're going to troubleshoot it let's go ahead and click on that button at the bottom troubleshoot a transaction and when we do so we actually have to select a sell within that Row in order to get the transaction details and have it troubleshoot what the issue is so in this I'm showing that I uh somehow received uh more money than was actually received in the uh payments received and so we want to take a look at the root cause of that and it does a pretty good job at identifying and gives me an analysis of what to do and what to research so that's great it gives me a little bit of homework and exactly where I need to look now the other area that I really like is that if we go into potentially match transactions let's troubleshoot again and let's take a look at this payment received and the reason why it's showing up as potentially matched is because this payment actually came from two separate payments on the same invoice so this is where you're trying to find the needle in the haystack and you're seeing that there's actually two distinct payments on the same invoice that equals that $840 30 I could go back to that payments received and identify those two transactions and yes indeed they are on the same invoice so sometimes that happens sometimes customers will make multiple payments on the same invoice maybe split the them up a little bit um and this is where it really helps out so a lot of very quick uh reconciliation analysis here at our fingertips and there's one more thing that I wanted to show you here and that is in its ability to perform reporting so again let's go through the steps again I'm just going to click next have it generate the Reconciliation Report and as it uh gives me the results of the summary the nice thing about this is that I can go ahead and Export this as a PDF and the large language models of AI have kicked in and it's giving me in you know plain English here of exactly what happened where the reconciliation issues were and really gives me a nice summary that I can give to an auditor or my manager or anyone uh up the chain of command so to speak so a lot of capabilities for co-pilot for finance it comes as a plug-in it works on older versions of office so really a lot of good things there well that just wraps it up for our co-pilot webinar and going into the New Year I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday ahead of them and I hope your New Year's resolutions come to fruition now before I leave off I wanted to remind you that manage solution offers quite a bit in the way of co-pilot assessments workshops chatbot builds you name it pretty much anything to do with Microsoft co-pilot and for example the co-pilot adoption road map lots of things go in here and we can tailor to whatever needs you have in particular uh typically we start out on a few days of Discovery discussions engagement and planning and then we actually go into really having some Hands-On use on co-pilot tools and things like that so reach out at the QR code there the link above our phone number is right there in case you want to take advantage of that and again have a wonderful holiday ahead of you and now we're opening it up to questions and answers and let's review the poll results at this time [Music]