Ep. 148: Gregory Kogan - Self-service Analytics

Contact Gregory Kogan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregory-kogan-083bb07/

Self-Service Data Analytics and Governance for Managers (book): https://www.amazon.com/Self-Service-Data-Analytics-Governance-Managers/dp/1119773296

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam: (00:05)
Welcome back to episode 148 of Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. This is your host Adam Larson, and I'm pleased to kick off today's episode by introducing you to Gregory Kogan. Gregory is professor of practice and accounting at Long Island University, focusing on teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in accounting and finance. He is also currently pursuing his doctorate in business administration at the university of Scranton with the research focus of data analytics and accounting. So in our upcoming episode, you will hear Greg discuss self-service analytics. Keep listening as we head over to the conversation now.

Mitch: (00:49)
In the field of finance and accounting, there's been a lot of talk about data and analytics. And, I know in your space you have a lot of experience. I'm just curious from your perspective, what is really driving the accelerated pace of analytics and the overall adoption at these larger enterprises?

Greg: (01:09)
Yeah, so I think the biggest thing, and if we're talking about the finance function, it's really the, realization of ROI (return on investment), where companies can use these new techniques, analytics, automation to accelerate their processing, right? So in finance accounting, for years, we've been doing things manually and repetitively. And now with these new tools and these technologies, a lot of companies are adopting these tools to accelerate processing, reduced processing time, reduce hours, accelerate processes, and there are benefits like it's more accurate, there's more control, better internal control. And those are really big benefits on top of the financial benefits. So there's sort of a convergence, I think that, companies are just taking advantage of this, the, to have more smooth and streamlined processing. That's more efficient.

Mitch: (02:08)
Now I know something that you focus on or, you know, you'd like to share a little bit more here are these, self service tools, right. And, you know, just for our listeners, what are some of the defining characteristics of this subset and how does it work into analytics? And, you know, when it comes to again, advancing some of these opportunities, I guess you could say, why do these tools lead to more of a decentralized pattern for your reference?

Greg: (02:36)
Right? So the tools, yeah. So the tools we're talking about, you know, and coming out, you know, very much out of the what's happening in public accounting and what's happening in the finance function in terms of, financial and managerial accounting. We're really talking about Tableau and Alteryx, which are off the shelf tools. And even in higher education, we have a lot of these now in the classroom. So this is a still pretty, fairly new, but very much highly used. And we call themselves service tools because, it's not something you develop, what you end up developing is a specific process within that tool. So for example, an Alteryx, you can create a little process that say does a reconciliation or a certain reporting. And it's something that used to live in Excel. That's really now living in this tool and we call it self service. It's in that bucket of you can really do it yourself, much. Like you do Excel yourself. You could really, as a finance professional, since it's low code or really no code you pick up the tool you put in your data, which you really, you already have access to. That's really something you work with on a day to day, and you can set up these, we call them analytics, assisted automations for Alteryx and in Tableau it's really dashboards and visualizations. So it depends what part of it you're working with. But yeah.

Mitch: (04:04)
That's very helpful. And I know, you know, in our space management accounts, specifically, a lot of that, you know, internal focused and we're really into, you know, the storytelling behind it and the tools that you referenced literally enable, you know, our, our listeners, our finance and accounting professionals to present this data in a way that's easily easy to understand for everybody, right. I think that's really the goal, but, you know, taking it even a step further here, try to, you know, set the stage for us a little bit. What are some of the primary motivations? And, you know, there is some kind of investment or, you know, even if it's just a learning curve in order to adopt these tools, what are the end goals, but what can our listeners expect if they're able to implement these strategies?

Greg: (04:48)
Right. So what you can, what are the, some of the benefits, essentially, after some investment, what you can end up doing is something that you do on a recurring basis, manually in Excel, right? And, and we had this also, as a case study in the book that we're kind of referencing here, the self-service data analytics and governance for managers, but this is something that I've been doing as a case study with students and in the MBA. And what happens is we basically have like five years of data of balance sheet and income statement data. And, and we do this in Excel where we compute all the financial ratios, profit margin, asset turnover, return, and equity. And we do like the DuPont model, basically for all the companies in the S&P 500. So for example, what we did as a case study in the book, we put it in the Alteryx and then we set it up as like little steps, rather than Excel. It's sort of all in one big place and you could still see everything. And we do pivot tables and graphs. It's still a very, very good, but once we set it up in Alteryx, we're able to filter the data by industry. So all of a sudden we started looking just at information technology. We started looking at graphs for each company of all the ratios, and then we started looking at specific companies a little bit further down the line to see, oh, wait, we just keep looking for the best one. What is the best industry? What is the best company? And then for that company, we have four dashboards for each of the ratios over five years. And after we set that up, we thought, wow, if this was like, say this was in management accounting, and I was doing my own internal reports, it could still be profit margin by region or geography. I could really sit with that and just flip my filter from Europe to north America and see my ratios, you know, and then we were thinking about it for me to do it in Excel every month. And it's something I used to do as an accountant. I just imagine it's a lot of work, get the new data uploaded, reconcile it. And that's something that takes us a couple of dates and just the flip, the switch. And Alteryx where you just upload the new data. And it does it for you. That's what we sort of started imagining. And of course we have seen the benefits. We've talked to people who've seen the benefits, but just to feel it yourself, like that amount of work going down from three days to like 30 minutes is exciting. And I don't know, I don't think you lose anything in the process. In fact, it is still stable. It is controllable and it's more flexible because the, all the charts are, you still see them, you know, and you just, you do it yourself. It's not something you have to call an IT person too. So I think it can e...