Analytics resources for finance professionals

Many finance teams, from accounting through FP&A and internal audit, are in a difficult situation: They’re aware of alternatives to spreadsheets. They know the value they offer, but the inertia of ingrained processes prevents them from making a transition to a modern analytics strategy.

In finance, change can be hard because there's often little time to experiment. By the time a reporting-and-analysis cycle is finished, the next one may already be beginning. Making a switch in the middle of a workflow can seem daunting and too time consuming to begin.

We’re sharing this blog post because we know time is your most precious resource and we want to help you make the most of it. If you’re just getting started, you’re in luck: Tableau Desktop and Tableau Prep connect to the key data sources you’re already using, including Excel spreadsheets and SQL databases. Most finance pros also tell us it’s easy to translate their pre-existing knowledge of calculations to Tableau’s calculated fields, especially given the free training on our website and resources on our community forums.

If you’re already on your journey to success with Tableau and looking to learn from others who are doing the same, then consider joining our Office of Finance community user group and signing up for our next Virtual User Group on May 2 at 12:00pm EDT/9:00am PDT.

At the meeting, Matt Illuzzi, Principal and Chief Finance Officer at icimo will share how his organization is finding success doing analysis on data from multiple source systems. And Matt Petrich, Business Risk Services Director at Grant Thornton LLP, will share how he’s using Tableau to identify and prioritize enterprise risk.

Regardless, if you’re looking for inspiration, trying to speed up manual processes, or doing strategic financial analysis, then the resources below are right for you. They include real use cases from Tableau’s customers, partners, and our own internal finance team. We hope they help you find your next big success.

Webinars hosted by Mike Crook, Director of Finance Analytics at Tableau:

• The price is right: the art of visualizing finance data - Receive free training on how to use Tableau with financial data.
• Advance your financial planning and analysis process - Learn how Honeywell Aerospace is using Tableau for inventory, P&L, and forecasting.
• Audit and risk analytics - See how internal auditors use Tableau to view all of their data and identify suspicious activity.
• Modern approach to cash flow analysis - Tableau’s treasury team shares how they analyze transactions for a deeper understanding of their cash flow.
• Tableau on Tableau: Finance Analytics - Tableau’s Director of Finance Analytics shares what’s possible from our internal use cases.
• Cost-cutting data strategies - Tableau’s Travel and Procurement teams show you strategies to reduce your business costs using analytics.

Customer presentations from Tableau Conference

• Lufthansa: Executive Decision Support - Tableau can help your executive board with better decision making.
• Enabling Procurement's Digital Agenda at Mondelez International - The Mondelez Procurement team explains how to use Tableau to drive business efficiencies.

Whitepapers

• 7 Ways Finance Teams are Driving ROI with Tableau
• 4 Ways Finance Creates Value with Visual Analytics

Workbooks and dashboards

• Tableau Public for Finance page - See and download Tableau’s internal dashboards so that you can rebuild them for yourself.
• Travel and expense analysis in Tableau - Learn how to analyze your Concur and Egencia data.
• Procurement analysis in Tableau - Answer your Coupa questions at the speed of thought.

Training

• Role-based, free training videos - Whether you're looking to connect data sources to calculations to dashboards, there’s a free video to show you how to do it in Tableau.
• Guided, web-based eLearning - Tableau also offers paid training programs to help you build advanced skills.

Community

• Tableau Community Forums
• Office of Finance Tableau User Group