FP&A teams spend 85% of their time preparing data—and only 15% generating insight.
That's according to an Accenture survey of 550 CFOs and finance leaders from companies with over $1 billion in revenue. And my experience with smaller companies shows similar results.
That means most finance talent is consumed by recurring preparation instead of decision-quality thinking.
You reopen last month’s workbook. Copy-paste data. Correct formulas. Chase errors. Month after month.
Why 85% of Your Excel Time Is Wasted
Most Excel reporting workbooks aren’t designed to update themselves. They’re designed to produce a report, forecast, or analysis for a specific moment in time. Once that moment passes, the process must be repeated.
So every month, finance teams rebuild what worked before. They open last month’s workbooks. They find new data. Copy-paste values. Adjust links. Enter new numbers. Recheck formulas. Find and fix errors.
And then they do it again, month after month.
They're using workbooks that were built to be rebuilt.
In traditional Excel work, “one-time” analyses quietly turn into recurring reports. A manager asks for something once. It proves useful. The next month, the same request returns—and the rebuilding begins.
Each month after that, the work resets to zero. Last month’s effort doesn’t reduce this month’s effort. Learning doesn’t compound. Experience doesn’t compound. Insight doesn’t compound.
For decades, that's simply how Excel reporting has worked. If you want updated reports, you rebuild the previous reports.
But it doesn't need to be that way!
Excel allows you to separate data updates from report design. When you structure your work productively, recurring reports update automatically instead of needing to be rebuilt manually—without using add-ins or VBA.
With the right Excel strategy, one-time analyses use the same structure as periodic reports—from the start. If a "one-time" report, forecast, analysis, or model becomes valuable enough to update, you don’t rebuild it. You just update it—with one command—and then distribute it on schedule.
The right workbook structure makes reuse automatic. The reset-to-zero cycle ends.
Why I’m So Certain About This
I'm Charley Kyd. I’ve spent decades studying how finance teams use Excel in the real world—writing about it, teaching it, and rebuilding the same recurring reports myself.
Over time, one set of facts became impossible to ignore:
The rebuild cycle isn't a talent problem. It isn't a motivation problem. It's a structural problem.
For more than a decade, Excel has included the tools to eliminate the rebuild cycle. But without a reliable Excel strategy, virtually no one has discovered the structure that lets them use those tools productively.
So I designed the Excel strategy to correct that problem.
After years of testing, refining, and applying it in practice, I developed a rock-solid strategy for Excel data plumbing. That plumbing flows data from our sources to our reports, plans, and analyses—without add-ins, VBA, manual intervention, or IT dependency.
➜ It updates automatically—with one command—instead of manually.
➜ It separates data from report design.
➜ It turns recurring reporting into a reusable asset instead of a monthly reset.
➜ It creates a structured foundation that makes deeper analysis—and AI-assisted insight—far more powerful.
That structured approach became the strategy you’re about to see.
How the Strategy Works
This figure shows the architecture that makes update-automation possible.
I call it the Excel Data Plumbing® Strategy.
Source data flows from nearly any source into structured tables inside an Excel flowbook, using Excel’s Power Query feature. From there, the data—controlled by global calculations and settings—moves through staging tables or normal formulas to produce reports, plans, analyses, financials, and so on.
Collectively, I call all such outputs reflows. The business professionals who build them are Excel Data Plumbers—Plumbers for short.
This structure deliberately separates data acquisition, transformation, presentation, and control. Because those layers stay isolated, the system turns updates into auditable and automatic data flows—instead of manual, mind-numbing drudgework.
At any time, you issue one command to update your flowbook. Interactive slicers can control both the calculations inside the flowbook and the data that Excel’s Power Query feature downloads.
The structure stays stable. Effort carries forward. Capability compounds—instead of resetting to zero each period.
You can distribute reflows in many forms—flipbooks, slide decks, email, Teams, PDF, SharePoint, and more.
Staging tables do more than prepare data for charts and summary tables. They serve as the foundation for cutting-edge analysis. That capability speeds deeper research—and gives AI tools reliable inputs.
Because most flowbooks can serve as templates for other flowbooks, even your flowbooks can compound.
You build once. You refresh forever.
The only question is how you get there.
Here’s the path…
The 12-Step Excel Transformation Path
The 12-Step Excel Transformation Path is a sequenced path that gets you to flowbook automation—that makes you an Excel Data Plumber—as quickly as possible. And then it expands what you can build with it.
Each step permanently removes a constraint.
You'll learn how to use AI to fill in any gaps you have in your Excel knowledge as you take these monthly steps. So if you're an Excel novice, I've got you covered.
Here are the 12 Steps:
Step 1 — End Copy-and-Paste Reporting, with Help from AI
You're introduced to AI and Excel’s Power Query feature. You eliminate one major area of manual report-rebuilding by connecting cleanly to CSV data. From this point forward, your reports that rely on CSV no longer require reconstruction. You also learn how a simple naming convention reduces errors in your formulas and makes them less cluttered.
Step 2 — Add Economic Context
You learn how to connect to structured web tables and economic data from the Federal Reserve Economic Database—FRED—while you also learn more about Power Query. Your reports and analyses stop floating in isolation and start living in economic context. You also take your first steps to connect to internal data.
Step 3 — Normalize and Scale
You learn to group, merge, and transform data at scale—using Power Query. Settings and worksheet controls begin to govern your queries instead of ad-hoc changes.
Step 4 — Build Flowbooks
You implement naming conventions, structured layers, and error trapping. Manual updating time begins to disappear permanently because flowbook structure replaces normal workbook randomness with controlled design.
By the end of Step 4, you'll have a flowbook that you can use to automate the production of most of your tabular reports, including financial statements. You’ll likely encounter a few hurdles. But with the help of AI and the EDP Mastermind, you’ll have the resources to overcome them.
Step 5 — Integrate Market Intelligence
You connect to financial and market data of public companies through a simple API connected to Data.Nasdaq.com. Your internal reporting can now include external benchmarks and competitive context. This is where your Golden Portfolio—which you’ll learn about soon—begins to take form. This is also where your Excel team members begin to climb your company's experience curve for Excel analytics.
Step 6 — Automate Executive-Quality Presentations
You build executive-quality charts and shape-assisted layouts that refresh automatically—with the help of well-designed staging tables.
Excel charts can be executive-quality; they don’t need to look like Excel charts!
If you haven’t worked much with charts, they can seem intimidating at first—especially if you’re an Excel novice. But with a small set of core methods, you can build charts like these with surprisingly little effort.
Excel can reproduce about 95% of the appearance of charts found in major business publications. So start to save examples of designs you like—no matter what data they display. You’ll soon be able to recreate them yourself.
Step 7 — Begin Your Golden Portfolio
You design your first your first Golden Portfolio exhibit, which will begin to demonstrate your business judgment, Excel skills, and ability to innovate. You also learn a modern reflow distribution method that elevates your data storytelling significantly.
By the end of Step 7, you'll be able to report and analyze the performance of any public company traded in the U.S.—using both charts and tabular displays. You'll be able to compare that performance to that of any other company—public or private—including your own.
And you’ll be able to present that work in multiple formats—including a flipbook SaaS platform that supports audio and video commentary, optional password protection, and interactive discussion about each figure.
Step 8 — Add Interactive Insight
You begin using interactive transformations that allow you to interrogate business and economic data dynamically—instead of reviewing it passively.
These examples come from a flowbook that displays financial data from Data.Nasdaq.com. While subscriptions to the data for large enterprises can quite expensive, individual plans typically range from about $40 to $70 per month.
Slicers to the right of both the P&L and the chart allow interactive selection of companies, dates, smoothing values, measures, and more—each with one click.
Instead of rebuilding reports when you're searching for insights, you can use slicers to interrogate the data directly. AI can assist in explaining anomalies—such as these diverging debt ratios of Apple and Microsoft beginning in 2018.
The displays update with one command, of course.
Step 9 — Use AI as a Knowledge Amplifier
You integrate ChatGPT and other generative AI tools for research, explanation, and analytical expansion—so AI multiplies your insight instead of replacing your judgment.
In previous steps, you eliminated much of your Excel busywork. In this step, you use AI to expand the depth, speed, and clarity of your analysis.
Step 10 — Scale Economic Intelligence
You use FRED’s API directly to scale macroeconomic context efficiently across your work. Instead of downloading data manually, you retrieve structured economic series instantly and at scale.
By the end of Step 10, you’ll have access to more than 800,000 U.S. and international economic data series. With Excel charts and AI, you’ll be able to search those series systematically for leading indicators that influence your company’s regions, markets, and core business.
Step 11 — Executive Dashboards
You build dynamic dashboards and summary tables that adjust automatically—and you learn how to template them so one design scales across many use cases.
Dashboards can take many forms. Primarily, you’ll design landscape layouts like the green dashboard, and portrait layouts like the other two—optimized for email, flipbooks, and print distribution.
By the end of Step 11, you’ll be able to generate C-suite-quality reports for your company and for your Golden Portfolio. And you’ll have the AI capability to research the business and economic drivers behind the performance you uncover.
Step 12 — Batch Automation
You complete your EDP transformation by refreshing and distributing reflows from multiple flowbooks with one command.
By the end of Step 12, you’re no longer rebuilding reports month after month. The structure is stable. Data flows in. Multiple reflows update with one command. You no longer spend your time copy-pasting, resizing, correcting, and repairing. Instead, you spend it interpreting patterns, testing assumptions, benchmarking
performance, exploring outliers, and explaining what the numbers mean.
You now use nearly all your time to generate insight—while your flowbooks handle the updates. And AI works as your partner, not as your competitor.
By this point, you’re no longer an Excel user who maintains reports. You’re an Excel Data Plumber—a business professional who builds structured Excel intelligence systems. Your time shifts from manual updating to insight generating. That shift compounds over time—in your capability, your visibility, and your value to your organization.
Who This Is For
The EDP Strategy is built for business professionals who rely on Excel in Microsoft Windows to produce recurring reports, forecasts, analyses, or models—and who want their work to compound instead of reset each month.
It is especially valuable for:
➜ FP&A professionals
➜ CPAs, Controllers, and other management accountants
➜ Financial analysts
➜ Operations and business analysts
➜ Finance teams in challenging business environments
It also serves executives who want reporting that updates with one command—without their needing to pay for wasted hours of manual data updating.
If you or your team members rebuild recurring Excel outputs and want that rebuilding cycle to end, this strategy was designed for you.
Build a Golden Portfolio That Gets You Hired, Promoted, and Remembered
Most accounting and finance professionals use Excel to complete assignments.
Very few use Excel to build career-defining assets.
As you move through the 12-Step Path, you won’t just eliminate manual updating. You’ll begin to build your Golden Portfolio—a collection of automated reflows that demonstrate your analytical ability, business judgment, and structural discipline.
Instead of saying you understand financial performance, you’ll demonstrate it.
When you meet with a public company, you’ll be able to display and discuss its own financial performance in depth—trends in its revenue, margins, leverage, economic environment, market cap, etc.—using structured analyses you designed yourself. Before those meetings, you can work with AI to research the company’s strategy, industry pressures, and recent developments—so you arrive prepared to discuss business substance, not merely your obvious Excel skills.
When you meet with a private company, you’ll be able to analyze its public competitors, industry, and regional economic trends with the same level of clarity. And—again—you'll be able to use AI before your meeting to deepen your understanding of the business and economic context behind the metrics.
After each meeting, your professional-quality reflows will give you a natural reason to follow up—quickly—with additional figures, updated metrics, or deeper analysis tailored to your recent discussion. You'll be able to email your follow-up as a URL to a flipbook that can include audio or textual data storytelling. Your recipients will be able to continue the conversation by responding in the flipbook, and you to them.
For the next several years, most professionals won’t realize this level of structured, update-ready communication is even possible. You won’t just know it’s possible, you’ll be using it to build your career.
That ability is powerful inside your company. It’s equally powerful for consultants, advisors, financial service providers, and job applicants who must establish authority quickly. Walking into a first meeting with structured financial insight—and the understanding to explain it—changes the dynamic immediately.
A Golden Portfolio turns Excel from an internal reporting tool into a positioning asset for Excel Data Plumbers. Inside your company, it elevates your visibility and credibility. Outside your company, it differentiates you in a marketplace where most Excel work disappears at the end of each reporting cycle.
It becomes...
➜ Proof that you can walk into any meeting prepared with professional-quality financial insight that you can produce in minutes—not days.
➜ Proof that you can follow up with even deeper analysis in a few more minutes—not days.
➜ Proof that your work compounds while others keep rebuilding.
It’s a key strategic advantage for your career.
If You Use Excel
If most of your time goes to the drudgery of manual updating, you’re only turning the crank—and generating far less value than your managers want.
The EDP Strategy eliminates manual updating first. Then it upgrades your role. Instead of rebuilding reports month after month, you design structured reflows that update themselves with one command. You don’t just deliver numbers—you shape how they’re generated, interpreted, and communicated.
You explore new perspectives. You integrate market and economic context. You use AI to deepen insight instead of rebuilding workbooks.
Your work stops resetting. It compounds.
You don’t compete against AI. You direct it.
If You Lead Excel Users
Right now, many teams spend each reporting cycle manually rebuilding last month’s work with new numbers.
That’s not a talent problem. It’s a design problem.
When the time spent on manual Excel updating approaches zero, you free up a significant share of the analytical capacity you’re already paying for.
Reflows stabilize. Error risk declines. Insight density increases. Knowledge and energy compound—instead of being lost to repeated rebuilding.
Instead of managing output volume, you lead a team that produces high-value insights—insights that command the attention of the C-Suite.
Your reports continue, but your reporting time approaches zero. Your reporting time shifts from routine delivery to strategic relevance.
You increase analytical capacity without increasing headcount.
If You Approve Budgets
If you approve investments in AI tools, analytics software, additional headcount, or learning and development, keep in mind that structural discipline matters more than speed.
AI without structure increases speed—but reduces control. It produces confident conclusions that are difficult to audit and often indistinguishable from what competitors can generate. AI makes it easier to modify data without governance, to trust answers without verification, and to mistake speed for insight.
The Excel Data Plumbing® Strategy introduces structural discipline. It stabilizes how data flows, how reports are built and audited, and how outputs update. Periodic reporting continues—but manual reconstruction disappears. Professional time shifts from rebuilding spreadsheets to interpreting results. Decisions rest on a transparent, auditable structure—not opaque prompts or manual processes.
This isn’t another tool layered onto the stack. It’s a structural transformation of how Excel work is performed. It protects analytical integrity, increases usable capacity inside your existing team, and ensures that AI operates within a governed system—not in place of one.
Excel doesn’t need replacement. It needs the structure that the EDP Strategy gives it.
Why I Teach This
I’ve worked with Excel professionally since its launch for Windows in 1987. I built the first Excel dashboards in 1992, wrote four books on using Excel in business, and led ExcelUser.com for roughly 25 years.
I also worked as an Excel and TM1 consultant before IBM acquired Cognos, and earlier as a consultant with Arthur Young (now Ernst & Young).
Across industries and decades, I saw the same structural problem repeated: capable professionals rebuilding reports month after month—not because they lacked skill, but because the design of their work forced them to waste their time that way.
The Excel Data Plumbing® Strategy is the result of solving that problem systematically.
It isn’t theory. It’s a structured workbook strategy shaped by decades of professional application and refinement.
The Economics—Return on Structure
Accenture found that FP&A teams spend 85% of their time preparing data and only 15% generating insight.
A significant portion of that 85% is wasted time—copy-pasting data, repairing layouts, changing values in cells, correcting the same errors again, and reconstructing what already worked.
But let’s be conservative...
Suppose an Excel-using professional earns $100,000 per year, including payroll taxes and benefits.
If just 50% of that time goes to recurring manual rework, that’s $50,000 per year spent turning the crank.
The Excel Data Plumbing® Strategy doesn’t eliminate most reporting. It eliminates most reporting time.
When the time spent on reporting approaches zero, those hours don’t disappear. They convert into time available for analysis, benchmarking, planning, and strategic insight—work that compounds instead of resets.
Recover even half of that 50%, and you reclaim roughly $25,000 of professional capacity per year. Year after year.
That’s return on a transformed structure.
Now compare that return to $197 per month for the 12-month Excel transformation path.
Periodic reporting will continue.
Manual rebuilding doesn’t need to.
What You Receive
Your 12-month subscription includes:
➜ The EDP Strategy Implementation Kit—12 structured packages (PDFs + working flowbooks) that guide you month by month through the 12-Step Excel Path
➜ Full access to the EDP Mastermind for the entire 12 months
➜ All updates and refinements released during your subscription
The Implementation Kit gives you the architecture and execution system to eliminate your rebuild cycles and build structured analytical systems.
The Mastermind accelerates implementation and expands your thinking.
Together, they turn structural redesign into measurable professional leverage.
Enrollment
Enrollment is open.
The Founder's price for the subscription is $197 per month for 12 months. You may cancel at any time.
If you decide within the first 30 days that this isn’t right for you, you’ll receive a full refund.
As the Institute expands and content is added, pricing will increase.
Founding members lock in the current monthly rate and receive new content as it's created.
If you’re ready to eliminate manual rebuilding and operate at insight level—at the Founder’s price—this is where you begin.
Click this button to get started: