Why accountants should create their Profit and Loss Statements in Pivot Table?

A CEO asked me why I recommended creating the Profit and Loss Statement in Pivot Table when a static report can do the same job.

I was taken aback by his question but on recovery, I realized that he has gotten so used to the old way of analyzing the profit and loss statement, one report at a time. I can imagine the amount of time he spent going through all the reports because that’s what I did in 3M.

And I bet that the CEO didn’t know that his staff has been spending hours preparing all the static reports for him.

When I was in 3M, I refused to accept the fact that I had to run through 100s of pages of profit and loss statements to find out why there was a spike in this cost and that cost. The process was very manual and it was inefficient, killing tons of brain cells along the way.

That’s why I decided to invest the time and effort to find out how I could put all the reports into one single worksheet and had all the questions answered in seconds.

There was no huge worksheet where I had to scroll up, down, left, and right to find out what happened. Just a few clicks and the report could be arranged to give you the answer within a single view instantly.

As an accountant, if you are still preparing the reports manually, you have to be prepared to be taken over by AI. AI is now capable of providing simple analysis to your boss.

The new way of adding value to the CEO is by becoming the guru who provides all the answers instantly to the business questions the CEO asks. And you need to have the Profit and Loss Statement done up in Pivot Table to do that.

Watch how the Profit and Loss Statement in Pivot Table looks like in my new Youtube video.