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  • 1.  Consolidated Summary Variance Analysis Populated in Word

    Founding Member
    Posted 01-27-2022 17:21
    Good Afternoon All,

    We currently do a ton of consolidated summaries where we explain our variance analysis in word. Do you all have any tips or tricks that expedite that process? Do you use other methods to populate this type of summary?

    Looks forward to your feedback

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    Garrett Litwin
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  • 2.  RE: Consolidated Summary Variance Analysis Populated in Word

    Founding Member
    Posted 01-28-2022 11:47
    Hi Garrett,
    I think that's the dream of many a financial analyst to reduce the time spent on those variance analysis by automating the commentaries.
    I am pretty sure it is possible to link your excel files to word (or powerpoint) docs, but in my attempts of automating comments in the past, I would create  a separate tab in my excel file to create text cells linked to the numbers, eg:
    ="YTD Revenue is"&A1&" "&IF(A1>0,"higher","lower")&" than budget" in which A1 would be your variance number... nothing fancy but still saving writing time.
    However, I usually always ended up fine tuning this automatically generated explanations to adjust format or tailor the commentary, so I would not say this has been a very successful approach, sorry!
    Clement

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    Clement Marlin
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    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: Consolidated Summary Variance Analysis Populated in Word

    Founding Member
    Posted 02-02-2022 16:33
    Hey Garrett,

    I think it really depends how much information/value you want to provide in your variance commentary. It's easy to use Excel formula like Clement suggested to create very generic comments based on the variance calculations on a P&L for whatever time frame you are looking at like "Q1 revenue was up 22% YoY." But if you want to provide real color in terms of why revenue was up 22% YoY then I think you are stuck researching and typing that out like "Q1 revenue was up YoY due to XYZ client doubling their monthly contracted revenue due to expanded services..."

    That said, when I was on the client side I did a mix of what Clement suggested and a mix of more colorful or value add commentary. I used Vena to capture all the comments in the data model and then linked to PowerPoint so my deck would be created automatically and all I had to do was chose the time frame. Took the BOD deck creation from a week to a day of effort.

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    Dominic DiBernardo
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    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Consolidated Summary Variance Analysis Populated in Word

    Founding Member
    Posted 03-29-2022 17:59

    @Dominic DiBernardo I never thought of linking Vena to PowerPoint. Do you have to keep the Vena file open when you refresh the data in PowerPoint? I'd assume you'd run into a connection issue with an everchanging file path. Or am I misunderstanding and you're just saying that you collect the data in Vena and then export it to a separate Excel file that has a consistent file path?

    @Garrett Litwin do you mean Word the program or "words" like Dominic and Clement have mentioned above? Assuming this is coming from a place of "non-numbers" people wanting to see summaries that they're more easily able to understand, I wonder if you can think through some data visuals to tell the story of what's happening. Some people gloss over numbers, but a nice graph with a bit of formatting might be easier to produce/refresh and be​ more visually appealing to your audience.

    ​

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    Brendan Eger
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    Original Message


  • 5.  RE: Consolidated Summary Variance Analysis Populated in Word

    Founding Member
    Posted 03-29-2022 20:08
    @Brendan Eger Vena actually has integration with PowerPoint. You build a report that has all the data tables and/or charts that you want to have in the PowerPoint and then you can link the PowerPoint to that Vena report that is connected to the data model. Once linked, when you open up the PowerPoint it will inherit any page options and will update dynamically without opening the report...what actually happens in the background is the report is opened serverside and the charts and tables are updated before the PowerPoint is given to you for control.

    Before I became a partner and when I was on the client side I used this to automate our quarterly BOD deck that used to take many hours before leveraging this functionality that made it take less than 2 minutes to run from Vena and then just add the commentary. Look up the documentation in the knowledge base - it's slick. The only caveat is that you have to keep it in its own process which is always the live process because otherwise, the process variables won't work properly.​

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    Dominic DiBernardo
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    Original Message


  • 6.  RE: Consolidated Summary Variance Analysis Populated in Word

    Founding Member
    Posted 03-30-2022 09:34
    Oh that's so cool! Thanks for the info, I'll take a look and see if our Finance team has any use cases for us to try this out on.

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    Brendan Eger
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    Original Message