Manual Excel updating must end!
The Excel Data Plumbing Strategy ends manual Excel updating, freeing you to produce the knowledge and understanding your managers need.
THE 85% TRAP
You're delivering only about 15% of the business value you could.
Everyone who relies on business or economic data is caught in the same trap. Business professionals who know Excel are manually updating last period's reports while this period's questions go unanswered.
That manual-updating trap hurts each role differently. Executives get weaker and slower answers. Managers lose team capacity. Excel users get buried in high-pressure, clerical drudgery.
The problems are connected. When Excel users replace their clerical drudgery with knowledge discovery, managers gain productive capacity. And that gives executives faster answers and clearer explanations.
One new Excel strategy. Three payoffs.
"Forcing a business professional to generate manual reports each period is like forcing a racehorse to pull a plow. It wastes the asset and exhausts the talent."
— Charley Kyd, founder, EDP Institute
THE 85% PROBLEM
A quick overview...
This page is long, but skimmable. Here's why it's worth your time.
According to an Accenture survey of CFOs, and other sources, you and other Excel users devote only about 15% of your time to giving your managers new knowledge and understanding. You spend the rest of your time clerking canned reports—often under strict deadlines—and on other low-judgment work.
That's not a problem you can solve with more Excel training. It's an Excel strategy problem, and your current Excel reporting strategy (the VisiCalc Strategy) hasn't changed since 1979.
In 2013, Microsoft gave Excel users the tools to end manual updating entirely. But almost no one noticed the true value it gave us.
The Excel Data Plumbing (EDP) Strategy is what those tools make possible: workbooks that clerks and admins can update and error-check with one command. That frees you and other Excel users from your clerical drudgery. And it allows you to devote nearly 100% of your time giving your managers what they actually need: new business knowledge and understanding.
EDP also turns AI from your job threat into your working partner.
The rest of this page shows you the terminology, the strategy, the proof, the benefits, the lessons, and how to talk to your manager about funding it.
But if you want the short version, four sections do most of the work:
1. Two 50-second videos show that a new Excel strategy empowers you to update your Excel reports with one command, and then discover hidden facts and patterns in your data.
2. The 12 lessons, which cover Excel automation (without using VBA or add-ins), external data for adding context to your Excel work, boardroom quality Excel reports, and supporting software tools.
3. Q&A, what people ask before they enroll, followed by...
4. What to tell your manager, if you need budget approval.
YOUR MANAGERS' DILEMMA…
Here's why you aren't delivering the knowledge and understanding your senior managers need.
You're doing the job they assigned you to do, using the strategy you were taught to use.
Accenture surveyed CFOs in 550 companies with revenues greater than $1 billion. What they found should alarm every financial manager:
"FP&A teams spend 85% of their time on tactical and labor-intensive production tasks and only 15% on generating insights."
— Accenture survey of CFOs in 550 companies with revenues exceeding $1 billion
That 85% isn't analysis. It's manually copy-pasting data, manually fixing number formats, manually searching for errors, and manually updating the same reports, period after period.
That's the drudgery that Frankenbooks bring to your week. They turn your business professionals like you into burned-out Excel clerks.
Frankenbooks are the cluttered, fragile, manually rebuilt workbooks you spend about 85% of your Excel time maintaining and updating.
Frankenbooks aren't a staffing problem. They're a structural one. And that structure is failing because it's still founded on the VisiCalc reporting strategy.
When VisiCalc, the world's first electronic spreadsheet, launched in 1979, users had no choice for their reporting. They built spreadsheets by hand and updated them by hand, period after period. Excel inherited that strategy. For 34 years, every Excel user worked the same way—manually rebuilding Frankenbooks—because there was no other way to do it.
Until 2013.
In 2013, Microsoft gave us the ability to end the VisiCalc Strategy drudgery forever…
THE DAWN OF A NEW GENERATION
Excel's Groundbreaking Transformation
The tool to end manual updating arrived in 2013. The strategy to use it didn't arrive until 2018.
That tool was Power Query. It was introduced as an add-in for Excel 2013, then built into Excel 2016. It could pull data, clean it, and refresh it with one command, leaving the VisiCalc Strategy and its fragile Frankenbooks behind for good.
But almost no one used it that way. Power Query looked like just another great new Excel feature, so that's how people treated it — one more button, not the key that could unlock 34 years of manual-updating drudgery.
That changed in 2018. By then, Charley Kyd had spent decades developing a productivity strategy at the intersection of Excel, finance, reporting, and management information — but it had been missing one piece. Power Query was that piece: the capstone that finally made the whole strategy work.
So in 2018 he began teaching it. (More about Charley further down the page.) Even Charley took years to put his finger on what made it matter so much:
By ending all manual Excel reporting, his strategy converts Excel-using professionals — whatever their titles — from clerks into analysts, advisors, and data storytellers.
Here's how it works...
THE END OF EXCEL DRUDGERY
No More Excel Clerking Required!
The EDP Strategy flows your data from any available sources, at any time, with one command.
Charley's Excel Data Plumbing (EDP) Strategy flows data, like water, from multiple internal and/or external sources, to tables in your workbook—without using add-ins or VBA.
Then it flows the data, through any number of transformations, to any number of reports, plans, models, and analyses. Because all Excel work with data is based on the same EDP infrastructure, you can update both "one-time" and periodic Excel work with one command. Collectively, all those EDP-based outputs are called reflows.
The data flows with one command—period after period—using Power Query. The EDP-enabled, well-structured workbooks that serve as the foundation of this strategy are called flowbooks, and the people who create them are called Excel Data Plumbers, or just Plumbers.
Flowbooks typically are much faster to build than traditional workbooks. Most standard Excel templates help only with formatting. But flowbook templates include complete data infrastructure: import queries, transformations, settings, and outputs. You start new projects with nearly completed flowbooks.
And because every flowbook can be updated with one command, it means that clerks and admins who know nothing about Excel can update and distribute reflows in their spare time.
As you'll see in two 50-second videos below, flowbooks not only automate your reflow updating, they serve as a foundation for data exploration and analysis.
Importantly, when you replace Frankenbooks with Excel flowbooks, your clerks and admins—who typically know little about Excel—can update and distribute your Excel work in minutes. That frees you to stop clerking Excel and devote all your Excel time to producing the business intelligence your managers need now.
WHY THIS WORKS NOW
AI made EDP practical.
Excel Data Plumbing has been viable for experienced Excel users since 2013. AI is what made it viable for all business users of Excel.
AI is the Excel partner you can ask anything.
The most frequent use will be filling gaps in your Excel knowledge. What does this do? What function should I use? How do I fix this error? Explain this formula. Rather than searching Google for answers, you use AI to answer them in seconds, in plain English, in your context.
Once your flowbooks are running, the questions get more interesting. What patterns are in this data? What leading indicators should I watch? Why are two of my competitor’s financial ratios so different? AI can explore alongside you.
EDP creates the clean, repeatable data structure. AI helps you turn it into knowledge, understanding, and direction.
WHY MORE EXCEL TRAINING WON'T FIX THIS…
The 85% Solution Isn't More Excel Training!
If mere Excel training could have solved the 85% problem, Excel clerking would have ended decades ago.
The problem with Excel training is that its job is to teach Excel features. But even Excel gurus, who know how to use many more features than other most Excel users, probably aren't any more productive in their jobs than you are. They're just unproductive at a higher level.
Instead, the EDP curriculum teaches a complete system that relies on several Microsoft apps, and one inexpensive SaaS—not just Excel.
It's the only system designed to give business pros who know something about Excel the time, energy, and tools to deliver the business operating and strategic intelligence their managers need.
The system supports data storytelling, data conversations, and brainstorming new reflows with managers.
Excel is the primary app for the EDP Strategy because Excel is the only app with the power and flexibility to support it.
SEE IT WORK
Flowbooks in Action
These two 50-second videos show fast-updating flowbooks and fast-interacting analyses.
These very short, AI-narrated videos show the Excel Data Plumbing (EDP) Strategy in action. The first video shows how you can update financial data for 32 public companies in about 40 seconds:
This second video shows interactive analysis that reveals a pattern that probably will intrigue your CFO. Although only one transformation is shown here, you could set up dozens of them, exploring thousands of combinations at less than two seconds each with the Transformations slicer.
The power these videos illustrate frees you from continuing clerical work, giving you the time and tools to deliver the reflows your managers need, when they need them. Your manual updates finally can become automatic, which gives you the time to discover the knowledge and understanding your managers need.
The old Excel role was clerical: maintaining the report.
The new Excel role is knowledge-generating: asking and answering business questions quickly.
YOUR PROFESSIONAL CALLING CARD…
Your Golden Portfolio
As you complete each phase of your EDP training, you accumulate tangible, executive-quality proof of both your technical skills and business judgment.
Unlike Excel training, which teaches features without business context, EDP training helps you build complete flowbooks using real external data. It uses the same external sources available to any potential employer or colleague. This creates something remarkable: a collection of working, executive-quality reflows, about nearly any public company you choose—reflows that you can demonstrate to anyone.
Your Golden Portfolio becomes your professional calling card. It's work you can show to managers and use in interviews.
Each flowbook in your portfolio demonstrates not just your obviously impressive Excel skills, but more importantly, your business thinking. With help from AI before your meeting, you can point out diverging trends, hidden patterns, reasons for volatility, competitors' performance, and so on. (Lesson 10 teaches you how to package your Golden Portfolio as a flipbook with your data storytelling built in.)
Because the portfolio uses public business and economic data, you can share it freely. There are no proprietary concerns, and no confidentiality restrictions. You can walk into any organization and show them current data they care most about—like their own data if they're a public company.
The result is a new category of professional assets: proof that you can turn internal and external data into executive intelligence, delivered using an executive-quality format and supported by business knowledge.
Lesson 12 builds your first Golden Portfolio flowbook for you — the complete cash flow forecast you can adapt to any public company — and every subsequent flowbook you build joins it. The starting point is the same for every Plumber; what you do with it isn't. By the time you reach that lesson, you'll have the skills to turn it into a flowbook that's unmistakably yours.
FP&A professionals: consider building side-by-side models that let slicers compare any two public companies—yours, your competitors', or anyone you're talking with. Then be ready to discuss the results from a financial perspective. Your real advantage isn't the Excel skill—it's the conversation those skills let you start.
YOUR CAREER ACCELERATOR…
The Concierge Plumber Role
Once you're free from clerical work, a new role becomes possible—one that gives you exposure most Excel users never get.
Like a concierge physician who gives important patients priority access, Concierge Plumbers each devote part of their time to support a specific senior manager. Working one-on-one—under your manager's guidance—you provide the custom reports, plans, analyses, and other reflows that your executive wants to see.
Phase 3's three lessons give you exactly the skills this requires: interactive analytical charting, boardroom-quality formatting, and information dashboard design that puts internal data in external context.
Most of your time, however, is devoted to your team's normal work.
For you, the Concierge role is an accelerated education in how decisions at the top actually get made. It's the kind of exposure that normally takes years to earn—and it puts you in working contact with senior leaders your title would normally never let you reach.
For your manager, it repositions your department from a cost center that cranks out standard reports to a strategic analytical resource that senior leaders actively seek out.
For your executives, the model delivers what they've rarely had: a business pro who's data-savvy enough to brainstorm with about what information they need, what data is available, and how to present it in a way the manager can consume it quickly and easily.
A second way to get noticed: the wall.
You don't need anyone's permission to print your Golden Portfolio reflows, and post them on lunchroom walls, cubicle dividers, or conference-room corkboards. They're safe to share because they're built from public data, with no proprietary content.
The senior managers who walk by will stop and look. Some will reach out to ask questions, request more, or pull you into a conversation. That contact is often how Concierge relationships can start.
Either path leads back to the same place: your manager. Which is why What to Tell Your Manager matters, and why it appears later on this page.
WHY EFFORT ISN'T ENOUGH
AI raised the bar. Manual Excel work can't clear it.
Why the harder you work, the further behind you'll fall — and the one strategy that breaks the trap.
AI has changed what your manager expects from you.
Upwork Institute research found that 81% of C-suite leaders have raised demands on their employees over the past year, and 96% expect AI to push productivity higher still. Most workers can't keep up: nearly half have no idea how to deliver the gains their employers now expect, and 71% are burned out.
Working longer hours isn't a sign of dedication anymore. It's a sign your strategy has failed.
This is especially true for Excel workers. The VisiCalc strategy traps you in clerical work that consumes 85% of your time before knowledge-seeking can even begin. And manual work doesn't scale.
The EDP Strategy makes AI work for you instead of against you. Automating the manual work makes your reports transferable to clerks and admins, who can update them in minutes. You stop being the bottleneck and start producing what AI alone can't: the knowledge, understanding, and judgment your managers actually need.
That's the work the market is already paying for. Workers with advanced AI skills earn 56% more than peers without them, according to PwC — though most employers are slower than the market to update pay. The way to capture the premium is to be visible to the market with work that demonstrates what you can do, and the Golden Portfolio — with help from AI for data storytelling — is built for exactly that.
The risk for those who don't adapt is now being said out loud:
"If you have a stubborn middle that's refusing to learn how to 10X their efficiencies and productivity, they're probably going to have to go."
— Gina Mastantuono, President & CFO, ServiceNow | Wall Street Journal's CFO Journal, March 2026
PROOF OF CONCEPT
Unsolicited Testimonial
A Head of Finance describes what changed when his team stopped manually updating and started producing insights.
Several years ago Charley launched a 30-month course covering similar ground. It found an enthusiastic audience. But it required too many lessons, didn't include APIs (which you must know how to use), excluded the use of financial statements for public companies, didn't include flipbooks or Power Automate, and predated the AI tools that make this version significantly more effective. Here's an unsolicited testimonial for that “Excel Productivity” course.
“Charley Kyd’s Excel Productivity course was a life saver for me. The knowledge, methods and overall skill in Excel I acquired while taking the course, proved essential in navigating 2 of the most difficult years in my career.
“We were understaffed, business was at a crossroads and we needed not only data analysis but useful insights in sales, marketing and logistics. The course provided both. Using Charleys’ unique, and deceptively simple method, we streamlined raw data from various sources, cleaned and combined it and used it to draw conclusions in ways that our ERP could never provide.
“The course itself is well structured, easy to follow with plenty of supporting material and sources for further study. The concept taught is groundbreaking with many aha! moments throughout. I find myself often returning to the material only to discover something new.
“Highly recommended.”
— Nick Triantafyllou, Head of Finance, Total Health Solutions SA
ABOUT CHARLEY KYD
Forty years inside the problem.
What four decades of Excel taught one person to see.
Charley Kyd is the founder of the EDP Institute. He brought unusual credibility to the productivity problem this page describes: an MBA, former CFO, 10-year Microsoft Excel MVP, author of four books about the business use of Excel, creator of the first Excel dashboards in 1992, and the author of nearly 1,000 articles on using Excel in business, all posted at ExcelUser.com.
He began teaching the EDP Strategy in 2018, then spent several years refining it—including the realization that ending all manual Excel updating doesn't just save time. It converts the Excel-using professional from clerk to analyst, advisor, and data storyteller. This page is what that strategy looks like in the AI era.
YOUR 12 LESSONS
Four Phases. Twelve Lessons. One Complete Pipeline.
Every lesson builds toward a single outcome: a system that updates automatically, serves as a foundation for analysis, and delivers the knowledge and understanding your managers need.
The EDP curriculum is organized into four phases that follow the path your data takes—from source to flowbook to finished reflow to the managers who need it. Each phase builds on the one before it. By the time you complete Phase 4, your entire reporting system runs without manual intervention.
Power Query is the engine that pulls data into your flowbooks. These three lessons teach you how to import data from multiple sources, handle the errors and formatting issues that come with real-world data, and connect to FRED—the largest source of free economic data in the world.
As an Excel Data Plumber, you'll find that Power Query is absolutely necessary but by no means sufficient—as you'll see in the descriptions of lessons 4-12. This lesson introduces you to Power Query by teaching you how to import data from a CSV file and setting up the table it returns so your formulas will be able to use it easily in your flowbook.
At the end of this lesson, you'll be asked to work with your IT department and/or AI prompts to connect a workbook to files with internal data you expect to use.
When you import data for your reports, plans and analyses, it will come from many sources that you'll need to error-check, summarize, transform, and so on. You might even need to shorten their labels, change their spoken language, or correct specific values in the data.
If you import data from tables in Excel workbooks—and there are several excellent reasons to do so—someone might move the file or rename it.
This lesson teaches you how to deal with issues like that quickly and easily—without manually editing your labels or data, or referencing external workbooks in your formulas.
With more than 840,000 data series, the Federal Reserve Economic Database (FRED) is the largest source of free U.S. and international economic data in the world. For businesses, their data is useful for many reasons. To illustrate their data can give you...
Economic context for your company's performance
Drivers and leading indicators for your company's and industry's revenues.
Interest and FX rates for your analyses.
Economic health by country and by U.S. states, counties, and Metropolitan Statistical Areas.
And much more.
In this lesson, you'll learn more about Power Query by using it to return FRED data from their web tables. To do so, you'll learn how to set up custom Power Query functions so that one Power Query query can return data from a long list of data sources with a similar structure.
A flowbook is not an ordinary workbook. It's a structured system that knows where your data lives, how to retrieve it, and where to put it. These three lessons teach you how to build that structure and connect it to FRED and Nasdaq APIs—giving your flowbooks easy access to internal company data, economic data, and the financial history of more than 3000 public companies.
You might need to use APIs to import internal data because Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle NetSuite, SAP HANA, QuickBooks Online, Sage Intacct, and others all offer APIs for accessing it.
Flowbooks are what make Excel Data Plumbers nimble. They give your workbooks the structure they need for agile Excel reporting, planning, and analysis.
At first, that structure might seem restrictive. But nobody says, “Interstate highways limit my freedom because I can’t drive through the forest.” The road is what creates speed.
A flowbook is a highway system for business data in Excel. The structure doesn’t slow you down. It keeps you from hacking a new trail through the woods each time you create a new report, plan, or analysis.
Here are the major worksheets you'll use in your flowbooks:
Control sheet(s), where you maintain settings, and key calculations
Pivots sheet, where you maintain very simple PivotTables to support your slicers.
Data and Metadata sheets, where Power Query returns your query results as tables of data.
Error sheet, with an Excel table that raises a conditional formatting alert when it finds an error.
Reflow sheets, where your reports, plans, and analyses live.
Staging-Table sheets, which contain your dates and calculated values to drive your charts and summary tables. Staging tables are the heart of your Excel automation and data transformation system. They support your ability to select, transform, and smooth your data—quickly—by clicking a slicer or changing a setting.
An API is much like a URL. But rather than giving you the web page you want in your browser, it gives you the table of data you want in Power Query (and other tools).
In this lesson, you'll learn how to use FRED's API to return data from FRED more quickly than you can return it from their web tables.
Sharadar maintains the history of financial and market data for about 4500 public companies traded in the U.S. Importantly, their data is standardized, which means that all companies' financials use the same categories. It also means that you can map your own company's data to those categories so you can automatically display your data in the context of the financials of any public companies you want.
This will be the primary data you'll use in your Golden Portfolio.
The data is available from Data.Nasdaq.com. For individuals, it currently costs $69 per month. You'll learn how to use their API by using both their free data sets and their paid data in this lesson.
Outputs that can't be understood easily can't drive decisions. These three lessons teach you how to format reflows to boardroom standards, build interactive analytical charts that let you explore thousands of data combinations with slicers, and create executive-quality dashboards that display internal and external data in the context of other relevant data.
You'll learn how to set up analytical charts and summary tables that will allow you to use slicers to explore any number of accounts, departments, date ranges, and other categories, for any specified data transformations, and with any scaling—labeled properly in the chart. You'll be able to explore the data in the context of any internal or external data you wish.
The charting methods you learn here are the foundation for the Concierge reflows you build for senior managers and for the analytical displays in your Golden Portfolio.
Would you like to create boardroom-quality reflows? To begin, find examples of the graphic design you want online. Or hire a graphic designer—perhaps someone on Upwork or Fiverr—to create a consistent design you like for your tables, charts, dashboards, text, financials, and so on. They don't need to know anything about Excel.
You'll typically be able to apply nearly all of that non-Excel formatting to your Excel work.
The formatting standards you set here carry through every reflow you build afterward — including the Concierge reflows you tailor to specific executives and the flowbooks in your Golden Portfolio.
You'll learn how to create interactive, boardroom-quality Excel dashboards that can display internal and/or external time-series data in the context of other time-series data. As with your analytical charting, your interactivity can include slicer-controlled degrees of smoothing, data transformations, scaling, and so on.
The first two lessons in this phase teach you to deliver finished work — through flipbooks that turn static reports into asynchronous data conversations, and through Power Automate distribution that runs without anyone touching a file. The third lesson is the curriculum's capstone: a complete cash flow forecast flowbook you adapt to any public company, integrating everything the prior eleven lessons have taught into your first Golden Portfolio piece.
You'll learn how to save your period's reflows as PDFs, organize them with Microsoft PDF Merger & Splitter, then import them into a SaaS flipbook system that allows you to add audio, video, and/or text data stories to each page. You email your recipients the URL to your password-protected flipbook. Your recipients then can add their own audio, video, and/or text questions and comments, to which anyone can respond in kind.
In short, the flipbook becomes an asynchronous meeting that gives your recipients the chance to think before responding to your results and any prior comments—with a full record maintained of all discussions about them.
The system is low-cost and you can learn it for free with two flipbooks.
You'll learn how to use Microsoft Power Automate to trigger a list of your flowbooks to reflow automatically—on a schedule, or when a specified event occurs—and then distribute the output without anyone touching your file.
This is where everything you've learned comes together into one working flowbook you can adapt to any public company in any industry.
You'll receive a complete, working cash flow forecast flowbook, pre-built for an example company using Sharadar's standardized quarterly data via the API you set up in Lesson 6. Ten to twenty years of quarterly history feed an indirect-method forecast — driven by dynamic settings rather than hard-coded values.
A staging table (from Lesson 4) contains the historical ratios that adapt automatically as new quarters of actuals arrive. Scenarios are dynamic too: change a small number of independent drivers, and every dependent line responds automatically. The flowbook ships with two scenarios you can swap with a slicer.
The flowbook also includes Growth-Rate Pattern Validation. By plotting two of the company's underlying business cycles alongside the forecast's implied trajectory, it reveals errors the dollar values hide. The discipline transfers to any forecast you build afterward, regardless of the tool.
For analysts, this lesson delivers your first Golden Portfolio piece. For working FP&A professionals, it teaches you how to stop rebuilding the forecasts you already produce every period.
Four phases. Twelve lessons. One result: a reporting system that runs itself.
By the time you complete Phase 4, you will have built the full pipeline—data flowing in from internal and external sources, transforming through your flowbooks, and distributing as boardroom-quality reflows without anyone manually rebuilding anything.
That's what separates a Plumber from an analyst who is still hacking a new trail through the woods every month.
YOUR MEMBERSHIP
What the EDP Institute gives you
Your enrollment delivers three things directly, and makes three more possible.
Twelve monthly lessons teach you to report, plan, analyze, and explain business performance—without ever manually updating your Excel work again. Wherever possible, lessons use actual public business and economic data: the same data you'll use to add context to your internal reports, plans, and analyses.
The Institute's training is built on the Durable Core Principle. You master the stable Excel features that create recurring business value, then use AI as a just-in-time tutor when you need a specialized feature.
Learn and use the durable core of Excel. Let AI teach you the edge cases.
You can become an Excel Data Plumber for about 1/250th of what your company would otherwise spend to get the same knowledge output in your first year — and you'll give your managers far more time, knowledge, and understanding than a new hire would.
Here's what that training delivers:
1. Twelve monthly lessons—covering the complete EDP pipeline, from Power Query through batch automation.
2. The EDP Mastermind Forum—a peer community of working Plumbers for questions about executive requests, data formats, Golden Portfolios, report structures, and so on.
3. The EDP Substack—ongoing research from McKinsey, HBR, MIT Sloan, Bain, and others, translated into practical flowbook approaches.
As you complete your training, you build a growing body of work your managers can actually use:
Flowbook replacements for your Frankenbooks, freeing your time to give managers new value.
Cutting-edge reflows built from analyses of internal and external data.
Reflow versions of reports and analyses that have been on your to-do list for a long time.
Concierge reflows tailored to the specific needs of senior managers.
Golden Portfolio reflows that demonstrate your business judgment and Excel skill to anyone.
Founding Member Enrollment
Founding price: $197 / month · 12-month program · Cancel any time · First 30-day full refund
About 1/250 of the roughly $600,000 your employer would otherwise spend to get one full-time knowledge-worker's output for a year.
Novice Excel knowledge is enough to start.
Founding seats are filling weekly. After 100 members the subscription price rises to $297/month.
Optional add-on: A personal Sharadar subscription ($69/month at Data.Nasdaq.com) gives you paid public-company data for your Golden Portfolio. The free Sharadar data sets are enough to complete every lesson; the paid subscription expands what you can build into your portfolio. It's also useful for your investment analyses. It's not required, not bundled, and not billed by us.
Need faster implementation? A few consulting engagements are still open.
Contact kyd at EDPInstitute dot com.
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
What people ask before they enroll
The most important questions people ask—and the answers that help them decide.
You describe a major change in our way of working. How do we retain control during the transition?
That concern is worth taking seriously. In early 2026, McKinsey's research found that the average employee now experiences ten planned change programs a year—a fivefold increase from a decade ago.
And in a Harvard Business Review article, Get Off the Transformation Treadmill, Bain partners described similar problems. They quoted a satirical article in the Onion titled, CEO Unveils Bold New Plan to Undo Damage From Last Year's Bold New Plan.
Transformation fatigue is real. And most change programs ask people to do more, learn more, and absorb more while continuing to do everything they were already doing. EDP works differently. It doesn't add to what your team is managing. It removes the work that makes everything else harder to manage.
The transition happens one workbook at a time. Your team never abandons a Frankenbook until its flowbook replacement has proven itself on live data. No big rollout. No parallel system to maintain indefinitely. Each replacement reduces the update burden immediately—and that reduction is what makes the next replacement easier.
The first flowbook doesn't require your team to transform. It just requires them each to stop manually rebuilding one report at a time. That's the whole ask. Everything else follows from that.
Does my team need normal Excel training anymore?
Probably not as a prerequisite.
Normal Excel training teaches many Excel features with no business goal in mind. And there always will be new Excel features to learn.
EDP training uses the Durable Core Principle. You master the stable Excel features that create recurring business value, then use AI as a just-in-time tutor when you need a specialized feature.
Someone with no prior Excel exposure will benefit from a short introductory course first. But active Excel users are past that point.
For specialized areas like FP&A and investment analysis, EDP training is complementary rather than a replacement. It provides the data plumbing foundation those methods need for quick and easy updating.
That's why EDP training makes your FP&A analysts dramatically more productive, as well.
Can’t I just use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot to do this?
AI can help, but only after your data is structured well enough to trust and update easily. But if you're still trapped in manual updates, AI won't help you much.
The EDP Strategy fixes the structure first. You build a flowbook once, update it with one command, and then give AI clean, consistent outputs to explain, summarize, and improve.
The EDP Strategy makes your Excel work AI-ready.
I already use Power Query. Do I still need this?
Yes—and the distinction matters. Power Query imports data. That's important. But without a larger design strategy, it creates half-automated workbooks that still require manual interaction and error-finding each period. You've automated the first step and left the rest unchanged.
The EDP Strategy is a complete workbook system for all Excel users in your company. It designs how data flows through entire workbooks so the update step requires no analytical judgment. That's what makes clerk-run and admin-run updates possible.
Power Query is a feature. EDP is the strategy that makes the feature fully productive for all users in your company.
Will automating my reports make my job redundant?
It will do the opposite.
Canned report updating is exactly the work that AI, automation, and cheaper labor will replace first. And your CFO—who decides when to start that replacement—could do it tomorrow.
But when you stop Excel clerking and start producing knowledge and understanding, you don't remove yourself from the process. You remove the drudgery that prevents you from doing the work your leaders are glad to pay for.
The EDP Strategy doesn't automate you out of a job. It automates you into a much better one—with much higher visibility, wider scope, and dramatically higher value.
Is this just another Excel course?
No! And the distinction matters. Excel courses teach Excel skills. And because Microsoft keeps adding new features, there's always another skill to learn and another course to take.
But EDP training teaches business outcomes, using an Excel strategy that will change little over the next dozens of years of Excel releases.
You could complete every Excel course ever offered and still spend most of your time manually updating reports every month. You would still be unproductive, but at a much higher level.
The EDP Strategy teaches a complete system that allows you to end your mind-numbing, burnout-inducing manual updating—so you can devote all your Excel time to giving your managers real business value.
Which do you want to be? An Excel guru? Or a business guru? You don't need the first to achieve the second.
Is this right for my whole team?
Yes, for four reasons.
First, it teaches your team to produce dramatically more business value than they do now.
Second, it establishes a consistent, standardized approach. So any team member can maintain, update, or build on flowbooks created by anyone else. Knowledge stays with the organization, not just the person who built the flowbook. Onboarding becomes faster. Turnover becomes less damaging. The team operates as a system rather than a collection of private methods.
Third, with your entire team following the same strategy, it benefits from Experience Curve effects. That makes your team collectively more productive over time than isolated Plumbers would be on their own.
Fourth, realistically, your team members who don't become Plumbers will generate less and less comparative value over time. So eventually, you'll need to give your non-Plumbers Gina's Choice: 10X or leave.
WHAT TO TELL YOUR MANAGER
If you need budget approval, here's the case to make.
It's not a case that Excel users have ever been able to make before.
The conversation with your manager goes better than most Excel users expect — because what you're proposing isn't more Excel training. It's a productivity strategy that pays for itself quickly, and that benefits your managers, as well. The case below, the questions you'll face, and the email you can adapt are all here.
1. The team starts delivering dramatically more value per dollar. Right now, according to Accenture and others, a typical Excel user spends only about 15% of their time producing knowledge — the rest goes to manual updating and overhead. A Plumber devotes about 90%. That's roughly six times the knowledge output per person.
Put another way: matching one Plumber's output with today's Excel users would take about six of them. That's roughly $600,000 a year in total compensation. EDP converts one existing team member into that Plumber for about 1/250th of that cost in its 12 months of training.
Or, if your manager prefers NPVs, let's be conservative. Suppose the Excel Data Plumbing Strategy merely doubles one Excel user's knowledge output, instead of delivering the full 6X. Doubling one person's output is the same as gaining one additional analyst. What's that worth?
Assume that analyst's fully-loaded compensation is $100K a year, growing 3% annually, and that the new capacity ramps from 10% up to full over the first ten months. Net the $197/month subscription against those savings, discount monthly over five years at 10%, and you get an NPV of $383,000.
And remember, this is the floor. It assumes EDP merely doubles one person's output. The full 6X case is worth several times this. So no matter what conservative adjustments your manager wants to make to the estimate of financial benefits, an EDP subscription is a pretty good deal.
2. The team's analytical output expands without hiring. Once your Plumbers free up the 85% they spent on manual updating, that capacity flows into work the team couldn't take on before — new analyses, faster turnarounds, more requests handled. Your manager gets the output of additional FTEs without adding headcount.
3. The function gets defensible. In this new AI generation, expensive manual updating is exactly the work CFOs are looking to cut first. When senior leaders depend on your manager's team for analytical capability they can't get from a BI-dashboard or a high-paid consultant, the team isn't on the cut list. Teams still trapped in manual updates are.
4. The Golden Portfolio illustrates hidden team skills. Much of finance's work is team-confidential. The Golden Portfolio dissolves that constraint. By building executive-quality reports from public economic and financial data, you and your team create work you can show to anyone in the company — without exposing a single confidential number.
That gives your manager visible proof of what your team can build. And once two or more Plumbers have Golden Portfolios in hand, the team's capabilities become evidence of a function rather than one individual's credentials. That positions your manager to lead an effort that helps Excel-using teams in other departments—like HR and operations—to implement EDP as well.
5. The Concierge Plumber service delivers unique executive benefits. Once your EDP training frees you and your teammates from clerking Excel, your manager decides which Plumbers serve which executives for about 10% of your time each month.
That puts your manager at the center of the relationship between senior leaders and the analytical capability they depend on for knowledge and understanding — delivered in a fraction of their normal reading time. It's real organizational leverage, and very few middle managers ever get that opportunity.
It also gives you the chance to work directly with senior managers, of course—years before you would normally have the opportunity to do so.
“Who covers your current work while you learn?” No one needs to. The transition is one workbook at a time. We’ll never abandon an old workbook until its automated replacement is working on live data. Each replacement immediately reduces our manual update burden, which is what makes the next one easier.
“Can't we just use our existing BI tools?” BI can deliver their BI-dashboards, which their programmers designed. But their programmers can't sit down with our managers to brainstorm ways to deliver the knowledge and understanding each manager truly needs from internal and external data. Also, BI isn't designed for customized reporting. Excel is. And with the EDP Strategy, Excel reporting is automated.
Subject: A proposal to free up most of my Excel time
[Manager],
I'd like to propose enrolling in a training program called the EDP Institute. The short version: it teaches the Excel strategy that ends manual Excel updating, so I can spend my time producing the kind of analysis you actually want from the team—not just maintaining last period's reports.
The math is striking. Recent Accenture research found that finance teams typically spend 85% of their time on tactical, manual production work and only 15% generating knowledge and understanding. That means the company pays roughly 6X what it should to get one full-time equivalent of knowledge-seeking.
The NPV of the training is amazingly high.
The program is twelve monthly lessons. The founding-member rate is $197/month with a full refund if we cancel within 30 days. I'd estimate a few hours a week. I'd transition my existing workbooks one at a time—each replacement reduces my manual update burden, so nothing falls behind during the rollover.
The full sales page is here: [link]. It covers the strategy, the curriculum, and a section specifically addressed to managers about what changes when someone on the team becomes what they call an Excel Data Plumber (Plumber).
If this is worth a fifteen-minute walk-through, I'll bring the curriculum and the math.
[Your name]
Link to this page when you send it. The arguments above land harder when your manager can read them in context.
The EDP Strategy frees your Excel users from all manual updating—so they can produce the business knowledge and understanding your managers need.
Founding price: $197/month · First 30-day full refund · Cancel any time
Novice Excel knowledge is enough to start
Need faster implementation? A few consulting engagements are still open.
Contact kyd at EDPInstitute dot com.
© EDP Institute · Developed by Charley Kyd · Former CFO · 10-Year Microsoft Excel MVP · MBA
Contact: support at EDPInstitute dot com