Improving Your Business’ Efficiency: Leveraging Alteryx and Digital Solutions

Fortunately, digital solutions and End User Computing tools—like Alteryx—can streamline operations and increase efficiency, allowing businesses to focus on growth, improve their processes, and optimize productivity.

What are Digital Solutions?

Digital solutions are computing tools that give users insight into data processing to help them make strong, data-backed decisions. When used correctly, they can help you perform monthly closes in a fraction of the time because they eliminate the need to manually consolidate data sets. These solutions can cleanse and consolidate dozens of reports in less than a second, saving you hours of work and allowing you to focus on other aspects of your company.

What Can Digital Solutions Do?

Digital Solutions can improve repetitive, consistent processes within your company. Processes with these characteristics are ideal for solutions because you can replicate and repeat them (weekly, monthly, quarterly reports). Once a process is set up, you can automate solutions or run them at the click of a button. Below are a few examples of how Exbo has utilized Digital Solutions to help our clients:

Consolidating Payroll Files 

Digital solutions, such as Alteryx, consolidate payroll files for multiple months or entities into one cohesive dataset. They can create workflows for most payroll systems, and you can customize them to incorporate client-specific calculations.

Account Mappings

Digital solutions cleanse QuickBooks, NetSuite, and other systems, preparing data for modeling and analysis, and eliminating the need for time-consuming manual data cleansing which can result in errors and inconsistencies. This ensures accurate account mapping, which is essential for financial reporting.

What are End-User Computing Tools?

End-User Computing (EUC) Tools allow you and your employees to use a unified computing environment through simplified tools and user interfaces. They simplify data editing and analysis, so you don’t have to learn complex computing languages. Each EUC tool has its own niche purpose, so choosing the right one for your company’s goals is the first step. Here are some of the most common tools:

What is Alteryx?

Alteryx is a powerful data processing automation software that uses workflows to cleanse and analyze data sets, turning them into easy-to-use reports. Workflows are processes made up of chronological tools that perform user-adjusted formulas on imported data.

With Alteryx workflows, businesses can quickly import data sets from various sources, change their structure and data types, and perform a range of functions to optimize data quality and integrity.

This software supports several input options, including CSV, Excel, QuickBooks, Access, Google Sheets, and others.

Creating workflows in Alteryx is straightforward and intuitive because it doesn’t require any complex coding, which is why businesses like it so much. It combines various data tools to consolidate processes, manage high data volumes, and keep data processing consistent. Alteryx's output options also allow you to create multiple files, rendering data available for further analysis and reporting.

How Do Digital Solutions like Alteryx Improve Models?

Digital solutions automate some of the complementary data processes that improve the integrity of the data in models. This includes:

Data Cleansing

This is the process of correcting discrepancies within data before it’s used, making it more accurate. Digital solutions cleanse client files and remove errors, inconsistencies, and structural obstacles so your decisions are based on reliable, factual information.

Data Wrangling and Formatting

After data cleansing comes data wrangling. This is the process of removing errors and combining complex data sets to make them more accessible and easier to analyze. Alteryx simplifies this process by organizing data into a usable format so it’s compatible with different systems. This allows you to properly calculate, analyze, model, and visualize, saving your businesses valuable time and effort. With Alteryx's user-friendly interface and powerful functionalities, you can manipulate data with ease.

Why is that Helpful?

Automating cleansing and wrangling not only saves time, but improves consistency and accuracy of data being used. With the proper set up, workflows avoid errors that are common with manual editing.

Alteryx is capable of processing data in a greater capacity when compared to other tools, like Excel. Some advantages are the ability to utilize multiple data sources, merge datasets with complex structures, and analyze large volumes of data and data types accurately. The simplicity formulas within workflows allow you to document data processing and provide the flexibility to adjust for process changes. The result is stronger integration of data for financial reporting, modeling, and analysis.

Final Thoughts

Digital Solutions are powerful software that can automate time consuming processes with significant accuracy and computing capabilities. Businesses can leverage computing tools to improve their processes, enhance data integrity, and increase the accuracy of financial reports.

Digital solutions like Alteryx improve business operations to maximize efficiency and unlock valuable time. If you want to learn more about digital solutions, or how your company can take advantage of Alteryx, please contact us.