Accounting Tooling & Excel Engineering
Twenty-five years of the small things that quietly ran a finance department.
The problem
Most of what breaks a finance department is not a system failure. It is thirty small manual steps that each seem too minor to fix, held together by one person's memory and one spreadsheet nobody else understands.
Why it mattered
The unglamorous tooling is what actually determines whether a close is calm or frantic. It rarely appears on a résumé, and it is a substantial part of what I have spent thirty years doing.
The idea
If it happens every month and a person is retyping it, it is a candidate. There is no threshold below which automation stops being worth it, only a threshold below which people stop asking for it.
The system
VBA applications and Excel add-ins, PowerShell utilities, SharePoint and Power Platform workflows, enterprise dashboards, variance and productivity models, pharmacy expense-versus-revenue models, supply inventory tools, GL validation logic — and the stopgap payroll systems built during the national Kronos outage that kept a hospital running for weeks.
How it works
- Excel add-ins and VBA applications distributed to the people doing the work
- PowerShell utilities for data processing and file handling
- SharePoint and Power Platform workflows for routing and approval
- Dashboards and variance models for executive reporting
- GL validation logic applied to catch errors before they reach a reconciliation
Controls
- GL validation logic run against distributions and balances
- Partnered with IT, Administration and corporate auditors on data integrity and compliance
Result
A finance department that ran on tooling built in-house, by the person who also had to use it.
Impact
- Pharmacy expense-versus-revenue models and supply inventory tools automated
- GL validation logic deployed across the organization
- Payroll data rebuilt by hand during the national Kronos outage; hospital kept operating on stopgap systems for weeks
- Enterprise dashboards and variance models used by executive leadership
What I took from it
Nobody gives you a project charter for the small things. You just build them, and five years later the department cannot operate without them — which is either a compliment or a succession risk, depending on how much of it you documented.
What I would build next
Consolidation. Twenty-five years of tooling accumulates in exactly the way you would expect.