Adam Larson: 00:20

Welcome to Count Me In. I'm your host, Adam Larson. And today, we're diving into the world of FP and a and automation with our special guest, Mike Dion. Mike has an extensive career in finance spanning from start ups to Fortune 100 Companies and brings a wealth of knowledge about streamlining finance operations. In this episode, Mike shares his journey into automation sparked by managing teams bogged down by repetitive tasks.

Adam Larson: 00:43

Mike addresses concerns like job security in the face of automation and emphasizes the strategic value you can bring to your organization by embracing these technologies. If you're keen to transform your workdays and enhance productivity, you don't wanna miss this episode. Hey, Mike. We're really excited to have you on the podcast as we're gonna talk about FPMA and automation. But I wanted to start with just talking a little bit about getting to know you a bit more in your journey in FP and A and what you drew you to focus on automation.

Mike Dion: 01:15

Absolutely. Well, first of all, I'm just so excited to be here. Just absolutely love the podcast and re and really glad to be a part of it. For my FP and A career, so I've worked in roles everywhere from brand new startups all the way to the Fortune 100. I started my career.

Mike Dion: 01:29

The first job I worked was as a finance intern and I've just kind of steadily moved up from there across different industries and companies and really just absolutely love the, especially the business partnering side of it. So I've done everything, you know, consolidations, business, support, and I just love getting to sit down with the operators, help a strategy, help them grow their business. And that's actually kind of what led me to the focus on automation. In one role at a major telecom company I worked at, I took over a team and I was told that this team every month end produces 30 individual decks with 30 individual excels. So essentially the team was spending half of their time across the entire month, just producing these repetitive decks and presentations.

Mike Dion: 02:12

They were the last ones out the door every day. They were working 90 hours a week and it was just, it was just crazy. So with that, that was my first foray because I said, this has to stop and it was my first time automating an entire process end to end, moving it into a dashboard. And then my focus on automation only doubled or tripled down once I had kids, and, you know, my my time is starting to get squeezed on both ends.

Adam Larson: 02:37

I get that too, with I've got kids as well, and it seems like you're always juggling something else. You have to find a way to do things more simply in a sense.

Mike Dion: 02:45

Yeah. Mhmm.

Adam Larson: 02:47

Yeah. So when, when you're looking at the finance, the finance team, like you said, a lot of times, they're the first ones in the last ones out. They're spending so much times on things, you know, a lot of times simple and finance team don't always go together. How do we, how do, how can we mesh those together to make sure, hey, this is super simple, approachable automation. We can get that stuff done properly.

Mike Dion: 03:10

Absolutely. I I'm I'm seeing everyone get busier. I'm seeing teams get smaller as companies think very creatively about their SG and A spending. And I'm seeing the strategic demands on teams get bigger. With that simplicity becomes kind of an art form that needs to be built into every part of the process.

Mike Dion: 03:30

I would say complexity doesn't necessarily improve things, especially thinking about forecasting simplicity does. What's great about automation is it sounds really scary. You hear automation, you start thinking, oh, I need Python AI and all these things. But automation is just having a computer do any task you would have had to do yourself. And there's a lot of tools, even things built right into the software, like Excel we're using every day that in 10 or 15 minutes, you can learn and shave hours off your Workday.

Mike Dion: 04:00

And that's really what I'm focused on. Isn't those, you know, those Python things or AI that are cool, but about things that people without a lot of training can sit down and do with stuff already installed on their computer, and it's just so much easier than they think it is.

Adam Larson: 04:13

So do you think it's, is it easy to decide which tasks are best suited for automation? Can all the tasks be suited? Or are there certain things is there a way to kinda, choose those?

Mike Dion: 04:24

So I've got a framework that I use. I have 4 categories and for each one, I assign a score of 1, 2, or 3. Golf scores. So one is better, 3 is worse. And the 4 things I look at are first, how many people need to be involved?

Mike Dion: 04:38

The more people, the harder it will be to automate a process. If it's you sitting at your desk running a report, you have complete control. Right? If it's, you know, 50 people are involved in producing a different story. The second is the processes that are repeatable.

Mike Dion: 04:52

If you're talking about automating your annual budget, that's a lot less value than a monthly close. Right? So you're gonna wanna automate the monthly close first. Frequency, so not just, not just the well, that one was frequency. Sorry.

Mike Dion: 05:02

For repeatable, it's how much does it standardize or change. Right? Mhmm. Is it fairly consistent every time you run it, or is it kind of an ad hoc request? I would do ad hoc last, and I would do repeatable ones first.

Mike Dion: 05:14

And then lastly, how many tools need to change? You know, is this something where you need to go ask for an investment and you're gonna need capital and new software? Or is it something again, where you are in control, you can automate using Excel or, you know, Dapp for software your company already has. And once I do those four things, I'll usually have a list of 10 or 15 processes I wanna automate. I'll score all these.

Mike Dion: 05:34

I love numbers, and then I just start with the lowest score and work my way down.

Adam Larson: 05:41

How how long does that take? You know, if if you're let's say let's say you you you're you're listening to this podcast. You're like, hey. That sounds really cool. I wanna score with my team, but we don't have time to do that.

Adam Larson: 05:50

It seems like how do you balance I I don't have time to do that, but yet I wanna make things faster so that we can create that time. Like, how do you how do you get there?

Mike Dion: 05:58

You know, it's it's a delicate balance, but I schedule it once a month with my team and myself to go through this process.

Adam Larson: 06:04

Okay.

Mike Dion: 06:05

The thing about automation is when you sell it to people that there's gonna be a lift now, but I'm gonna save you time in the future. You have to make that very tangible. And this process actually makes it so tangible. People can see the processes they own and the time they're spending. And you can tell them, you know, this is the amount of time we can save you.

Mike Dion: 06:25

So when you have people go through that exercise, it is more work short term, but I've never seen it not lower someone's work time in the in the back end. Right? And it's about just putting it on the calendar, making it a critical part. I have a standing that the first meeting we do every single calendar month, that meeting is when we go through automationless.

Adam Larson: 06:45

Yeah. Well, a lot of times people when people hear automation, they think, I, you know, I need to be an engineer. I need to know coding and all those things, and it can be very intimidating. So are there ways to kind of make it less intimidating?

Mike Dion: 06:56

There absolutely are. I think the the biggest thing I look for is where can you automate with tools that you already have? One of my favorite automations for finance people, which is the last thing people would think I would say is automating your email. Right? A lot of us are buried under 100 of emails.

Mike Dion: 07:12

We all know how to use outlook and Gmail and the email filtering in those systems is automation because the computer is doing it for you. And you can get, you know, half of your inbox is automated going to certain folders. I mean, the number of emails I get a day that are just system updates that I don't even need to look at is Mhmm. Astounding. That's automation.

Mike Dion: 07:32

Right? You could think about things like if you're currently running scenarios for your leadership to understand the business, you can build that in a data table in Excel in 5 minutes. There's so much low hanging fruit of just using tools you already have. And then, you know, if you have the resources to go be fancy with Python, AI possibilities are endless, but this is a great way to just get started. And this will save the average person.

Mike Dion: 07:54

I'd say, you know, at least 25% of their work week is on things that you could automate with outlook and Excel.

Adam Larson: 08:03

I yeah. It it I think some people try to look at they when they think about things like automation, they think about the big things. And I really like how you're breaking it down. It's like, no. Start with all these simple things.

Adam Larson: 08:13

And as you learn, you can say, okay, I can maybe tackle the bigger things as I hit those.

Mike Dion: 08:18

Yeah. My my biggest time savings come from things like pivot charts, which a lot of people don't use. Yeah. Data tables for scenario analysis, power query, power pivot. These are all just already buttons in Excel.

Mike Dion: 08:29

Click a button and you're going. And I put off learning these for years because power query just sounded scary. And when I ultimately sat down, you can learn the fundamentals of power query in maybe half an hour. And I've successfully taught entire teams of people in 30 minutes and gotten them up and running. And yeah, you can spend hours and you can learn all of the bells and whistles, but to really save the average finance person's time and the work we're doing, or even in accounting, the average person can get all that benefit in about 30 minutes of learning.

Adam Larson: 09:01

That's that's crazy. So, you know, when we were talking before, you had mentioned you have something called a 5 minute automation series, and it sounds really accessible. It sounds really cool. Maybe you can give us an example of what kind of an easy automation that prevails professionals might overlook. You've already talked about email.

Adam Larson: 09:15

Are there other ones that we can, have an example of?

Mike Dion: 09:18

A big one is scenario and sensitivity analysis. So I've been planning scenarios, you know, best case, worst case, middle case, or sensitivity of if, you know, if our sales targets come down a little bit, what would that do to the business? And this is so fast to build. If you've already got your financial models, which hopefully all of us do, and you have the drivers in there. Right?

Mike Dion: 09:39

All you're doing is you're just pointing the table to a driver. You're allowing that driver to run through the model and Excel will just reiterate all the calculations for you. A lot of people that I watch still today are just typing in the changes, then screenshotting and putting a PowerPoint, typing in a change, screenshotting, putting a PowerPoint. You can automate that entire analysis and it it's using functionality that we all use on a daily basis. Right.

Mike Dion: 10:00

It's just right there. I can't think of someone who hasn't used what if analysis and it's just kind of one more step on top of that, That is just running. What if analysis multiple times. Right. And it's very approachable for people.

Mike Dion: 10:13

That is approachable. And

Adam Larson: 10:17

why is it, do you think that people make it so complicated? Make it feel so complicated.

Mike Dion: 10:23

I think part of it is, I mean, at least I'll speak for myself. I put it off for so long just because it seemed scary. You hear these terms like power query, power pivot. And the other thing is the people you tend to see using them tend to be the more systems focused people. The people that I saw using these systems were our financial systems teams.

Mike Dion: 10:45

They were our, you know, our project teams that were doing a lot of this development work for us. I didn't see just, you know, analysts or finance managers around me using it. And it seems like this really unapproachable technology. It seems like something where you're gonna have to start coding. And on top of that, we're all busy.

Mike Dion: 11:03

You know, there, you do have to dedicate that time to it. And you have to schedule that time and it may make your workday longer that day. You just have to know that the benefit is coming on the back end. And if you don't schedule it, and if you don't understand that this is an approachable tool with the right kind of training, you know, you'll put this off forever just like I did. I mean, I this was literally years of me putting this.

Adam Larson: 11:28

Well and I feel like sometimes we we make things bigger than they are. And then, like you said, you have to actually schedule it because you have to actually make time for things that you deem important. So unless you do that, it's never gonna happen.

Mike Dion: 11:41

You do. And I I coach analysts on this all the time that Mhmm. They, you know, like, I'm I'm so busy. I don't have time to make this process better. And then I watch them spend 8 hours manipulating data to generate a monthly report.

Mike Dion: 11:54

Right? As, like, you could spend that 8 hours and I promise you that 8 hours becomes 2. Like, I I know watching what you're doing that 8 hour becomes 2 with power query. And Yeah. Yes.

Mike Dion: 12:04

You're gonna have to sit down and spend that 8 hours. But then every month for the rest of the year or a couple of years, however long you're in this role, that time comes back to you.

Adam Larson: 12:14

It really does. And and when you've when you've helped teams implement this, you know, have you seen a huge impact on their work life balances and help them kind of, like, don't know they don't necessarily have to be the last ones out every night?

Mike Dion: 12:25

Huge. Yeah. When I when I rolled this out in the telecom industry, you know, they were working 90 hours a week when I took it over. They were the last ones out. Mhmm.

Mike Dion: 12:33

When I introduced the dashboards and once we got all of the executives going straight to the dashboard ecosystem, we were down to 45 hours a week and we were the first ones out. It was absolutely transformative that we were literally walking out. We didn't have any data management. We didn't have to even send reports because we were having the dashboards notify people that they were there. And we were spending all of that 45 hours on just supporting our business partners on helping them understand their results.

Mike Dion: 12:59

So we were adding more value because we were giving them actionable items to do for the next month while all of our peer teams were still building the reports.

Adam Larson: 13:10

Yeah. And that's, I think, the amount of stress and the amount of burnout that we're seeing across many industries or many organizations, I think looking at it, taking a step back and saying, how can I use automation? It's gotta be the way to go going forward to be successful.

Mike Dion: 13:27

It is because we're we're never going to staff to make it through a month end or a budget season. Right? We're never going to have those resources. And even in the off cycle, it's starting to get tighter, both from both from cost containment also just I mean, accounting has, you know, shortage of 200 to 300,000 professionals right now. So not only do we not have the ability to put those resources there, we don't necessarily even have the talent to put there.

Mike Dion: 13:52

And that's what we're doing is it's not that it's going to it's not that it's necessarily always gonna change your job. It's that it's gonna reduce that lumpiness of what your weeks kind of look like.

Adam Larson: 14:02

Now what would you say to somebody who says, well, am I gonna automate myself out of a job?

Mike Dion: 14:07

That is a great point that I spend a lot of time on. So Yeah. You know, first of all, I always like to point out that everyone thought Excel would destroy the industry. Right? When we moved from paper ledgers to Excel, everyone thought, you know, finance and accounting or debt.

Mike Dion: 14:19

There are 100 of thousands of more roles in the industry today than there were back before we did that elimination. And, yes, individual people at the time, there will be impact. So, you know, don't wanna shy away from that. But the industry in general grows through this. You add, you know, compliance functions, strategic work, all these things that Excel allowed us to do.

Mike Dion: 14:37

This is just the next wave of that, but all of our professions are bigger. The second thing, you know, as I already said, there's a massive talent shortage in accounting. There's starting to be some signs of talent shortages in finance, especially on the really strategic work. And then the other thing is if you don't automate somebody else will. Right?

Mike Dion: 14:57

The people who will not be replaced by automation, AI are the ones who are adding strategic value. So if you're spending your entire day running processes, somebody at some point is going to develop software that can do some of this work and companies will start buying. Right? That's that's where we're headed. If you're already positioned that you're the one out there delivering the strategic value, you're the one who's going to be a hoops, who's going to be sticking around.

Adam Larson: 15:23

So, you know, you wanna be that one that's sticking around. You wanna be that one adding value. We've talked about the automation. What are some what are some skills and and some, things that accounting and finance professionals can do to kinda say, hey, I can be better, situated to do this automation better to to to be that person who's that strategic partner?

Mike Dion: 15:42

If I could tell everyone to do one thing, it would be to learn the power apps. I would start with power query, Then power pivot and then power BI. If you know those 3 things, you know, we all, for the most part have some type of monthly or quarterly reporting. We all have some type of forecast that requires data input. If you learn those 3 and even just power query, that's going to transform the time you spend on data because regardless of your systems, right?

Mike Dion: 16:12

Some companies have good systems. Some companies have systems that are real challenges, regardless of the company's data, you can build your own hierarchies and structure to automate your reporting regardless of what the systems and target accounts look like. That alone will shave off time. Then you add in the ability to save your steps to have them run every single month for you. Then you add in the ability to start building calculations in before it comes into Excel.

Mike Dion: 16:39

You can get rid of nested functions. You can get rid of index matches with V lookups. You can speed up your workbooks. There's all those things you can do. And then the final step, once you've got all that data transformed, you can stick it into Power BI.

Mike Dion: 16:51

It'll build all your charts for you, and it will send it to them automatically. Right? And I I truly think you can learn, you know, 80 20 rule. You can learn 80% of the functionality and get the value from it in an hour or 2. Like, you you truly can as you focus on the right thing.

Mike Dion: 17:08

And then I've gone through and set up some trainings that each of these systems have 20 minutes. Here's the basics. Here's the fundamentals and you're up and running. And the best part, it's already in Excel with the exception of more advanced power BI subscriptions. And it is built in.

Mike Dion: 17:22

It's free. You don't even have to go download anything. And I'm sure the majority of companies, if you use Office 365, you do have access to Power BI as well. So all of that is just right there without asking for any capital without having to build a business case entirely in your control. And that's really what I'm about is is taking control of this and not waiting for your company to give you the resources.

Adam Larson: 17:43

Well yeah. Because if you sometimes as you wait for the company, you know, you've gotta go through quotes. You have to go through these all these hoops and red tape and corporate structures and how everything's set up. And then you never actually get to use the tool as opposed to, like, maybe the 30 day trial that you you maybe got access to.

Mike Dion: 18:00

Yeah. And, oh, by the way, it'll probably be changed so many times. It won't even necessarily meet your original requirements.

Adam Larson: 18:05

Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, I love this thought of, like, hey. Just find the tool that out there that works, you know, and you've you know, obviously, the power query stuff that's available because most organizations, unless they're, like, a a Google organization, you know, they have access to those to those tools. So let's say, hey.

Adam Larson: 18:20

Somebody's using the the the Google suite of products, and I don't have access to Excel, which is kinda crazy. You know, what would you say to that person?

Mike Dion: 18:28

So at that point, it gets more complicated, but there are still great options. So there's a macro similar of ability in Google Sheets where you can build some coding. Google also has, the ability to create apps. And if you're on a workspace plan, you have the ability to create apps with a kind of, talking interface. Even better if your company has Gemini, you can actually just tell Gemini how to build the app.

Mike Dion: 18:50

But those apps can actually replicate a lot of the data manipulation you're doing in Excel. So the training is longer. Right? We're not talking an hour or 2. We're talking, you know, a couple of days, but all that functionality is there.

Mike Dion: 19:01

And if you're really motivated to do this, you can do it just as easily in Google sheets. Still a big Excel fan. I have worked in a Google sheets company before and it is challenging. But I never found something I could not replicate. It may have taken a little extra learning or research, but I can replicate everything Excel can do in Google Sheets.

Adam Larson: 19:19

So, you know, automation is an amazing thing. And I feel like, we've you know, you've given a wonderful some wonderful examples of how people can get started, you know, especially if it feels overwhelming to them. Obviously, it's gonna keep evolving. You you mentioned Gemini. You know, you've we have all these different, large language model tools out there.

Adam Larson: 19:39

How do you think the incorporation of those different tools, like, you know, obviously, in Microsoft, you have the copilot that you can integrate in there. How do you think the introduction of these these AI tools that you can say, hey, I wanna you know, like, you can go to, excelgbt., dotco.uk and say, Hey, I wanna do, like, I wanna do this in Excel and type out this whole paragraph and it gives you a, you know, it gives you a nice little formula there. You know, how do you think those things will change the evolution of this automation that we've been talking about?

Mike Dion: 20:07

Yeah, I think, you know, this is I say this is the new Excel. This is something that everybody needs to know and be learning these tools. I'm focused on the basics. I do highly recommend everyone pick a new technology like a Python or some of the tools and learn about. But this is where it becomes really important about how you're spending your time and what you're focused on.

Mike Dion: 20:25

Right. What we're going to see is that reporting is going to become very automated, right? Because the actual process of reporting does not in itself add value. We're gonna see the data collection and I think even the first pass of a forecast become automated. We're already starting to see that with some predictive modeling in Python and other tools.

Mike Dion: 20:45

What's really important is that you're focused on where you can add value because we are a cost center, right? Even if it's a necessary cost like compliance, we're a cost center. So where can we add value? If you're in a, you know, compliance role, how can you make things more compliant and also make compliance easier? If you're in a role like FP and a, how can you add strategic value, which is it's not the report.

Mike Dion: 21:08

It's how do we pivot based on the report, right? It's not the forecast. It's how do we deliver this forecast? And we start to fall short of it at actuals. It's looking at the outside market, taking the time that you now have that you're not reporting to look outside the walls of your company and say what's happening and how should that impact our strategy and coming to your operators who are also very busy with these opportunities.

Mike Dion: 21:33

And you need to look at and when I first started on finance reporting was like the thing you did. Entire people's jobs were just building reports or updating data for forecasts. But it's critical that you start looking at that as just a necessary tool to get to the bigger picture, which is the strategy.

Adam Larson: 21:50

Yeah. Well, I like how you're saying that, like, these are the tools that we need to use. It's not it's how you use the tool and how you apply the tool because and you can put a hammer in a in a baby's hand. He's not gonna be able to nail something. You gotta be able to use the tool properly.

Mike Dion: 22:04

And, yeah, I mean, I I easily see a future 5 years from now where we just have, you know, a copilot or Gemini built in, and we can ask a reporting question because a lot of that reporting part has been automated. But what AI is never gonna know is that, oh, you know, Bob from accounting keeps entering invoices wrong. Right? They're not gonna know that there's this market factor happening out in the industry that's gonna change things and you need to build that into the models. And that's where you need to be spending your time on things that AI can't see into the future or the nuances and context within the business where it's not functioning in this perfect mold.

Mike Dion: 22:36

Right? Where something is happening that is not a computerized variable.

Adam Larson: 22:43

Do you think so you mentioned, like, if Bob is entering the invoices incorrectly. So before somebody gets to, like, automating larger and larger things, is it a good practice to kinda go through and make sure that all your processes are well and your data is in a good spot too?

Mike Dion: 22:58

Yes and no. In a perfect world, you should always be chasing better processes and better upstream data.

Adam Larson: 23:04

Of course.

Mike Dion: 23:05

In a realistic world, I don't want the person sitting at their computer working an 80 hour month end to wait for the data to be better. I want you to use these tools to fix those problems as you go. And then also go back into effect that the process should run-in parallel. And so many people get stuck trying to get the data inputs perfect. That will never happen.

Mike Dion: 23:26

If you're working in, you know, retail, someone's going to enter something with, you know, capital letters or an extra a. And the point of sale is not going to match them. Power Query can probably match them. Right? So don't don't wait.

Mike Dion: 23:37

Yes. Try to go back and fix your point of sales, fix your invoices, fix your, you know, payment systems. But that is just never I I don't think there's a world where that is ever perfect even with AI.

Adam Larson: 23:49

Do you think the automation helps us, our our ability to see those errors in a in a quicker manner?

Mike Dion: 23:55

Absolutely. Because when we're not spending time aggregating, collecting, and Mhmm. Putting the data in place, you would you have the time to see this. And that's also where AI is really good at spotting outliers. Like, it's it's still not doing a lot of great stuff with numbers today, but it spots outliers really well.

Mike Dion: 24:13

And I found that's very that is a very valuable use is to just have, you know, chat GPT, scan this dataset, look for outliers. And if there's an error in the data, it's actually quite gonna catch it. Can't fix them, but you can catch them.

Adam Larson: 24:24

Okay. Well, that's great because then I like that idea of doing in parallel because in real in a real world, you can't say, we're gonna take a policy here and look at all of our data. Like, that that would just never happen.

Mike Dion: 24:33

New issues will be continuously introduced. Right? You in any in any organization with people, which is all of them, you're gonna have continuous data issues introduced, and that shouldn't be the focus because you can get to the value, which is again making the strategic decisions and helping people change the trajectory of the business. Perfect reporting is not the goal. The goal is to know what's happening in the business and to be able to direct the business in a better direction.

Adam Larson: 24:56

Yeah. The the reporting just might be a nail or a board that you're putting down, but it's not the whole picture. Exactly. Yeah. I like that.

Adam Larson: 25:05

I like how you explain things, Mike, because it it's makes it so simple that I'm like, we should all give this a try and I hope everybody who's listening to this feels that because the way you explain things, it really puts it in a manner that I really have no argument. Let's just do it.

Mike Dion: 25:18

Yeah. And and, you know, I've spent a lot of time selling people because there's always the initial resistance. So this this has been built over time, but the great thing is I can I can prove it out? I've seen enough people be resistant, but then learn it fast and then start applying in the different ways. And I've, I've watched people's work weights shrink.

Mike Dion: 25:37

So I, I now have the confidence to say definitively that this is what will happen if you apply it because I've watched it happen now so many times.

Adam Larson: 25:45

Yeah. You have. Well, Mike, this has been a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate you sharing, about automation and everything you've learned because I and and I love your passion about it, and I just I really wanna thank you for coming on the podcast.

Mike Dion: 25:59

Well, I appreciate it. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. Thanks for having me.

Announcer: 26:03

This has been Count Me In, IMA's podcast providing you with the latest perspectives of thought leaders from the accounting and finance profession. If you like what you heard and you'd like to be counted in for more relevant accounting and finance education, visit IMA's website at www.ima net.org.