The VP of Finance went through a 5-6 day process every month to separate out operating expenses by department every month. It was not entered at that level of granularity. This was complicated logic. As an example: * If this department used their AMEX, then it should be split between these two departments at a 75/25% rate. Otherwise AMEX went to the originating department (after every employee was mapped to a department). * Vendor expenses for specific vendors went to one department, but others went to another department. * Insurance and Payroll Taxes, yet another way. * There were over 20 of these rules, much of it in the brain of the CFO who had historical knowledge of how it should be shared with the venture capitalist.

Future vision was for an easy to use pivot table that could be shared with the CFO and the investors within a day of book close. I relied heavily on Excel Tables, Power Query on Power Pivot to make all this happen. The end result was that the VP of Finance could now drop general ledger book close data into a table in Excel, hit the refresh button, and everything updated automatically. He looked like a HERO.