Excel and Spreadsheet Tips
How To Use Python in Excel for FP&A: Use Cases and Examples
Learn how to use Python in Excel for FP&A use cases such as forecasting, predictive modeling, and data cleaning.
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Finance teams often default to Excel for everything—reporting, reconciliations, and pulling data from multiple systems to analyze—because it’s familiar and convenient.
But as the business scales, the cracks start to show. Hours are wasted on manual admin tasks like copying across systems that don’t talk to each other, chasing budget owners for updates, and reconciling last-minute spreadsheet changes.
All that inefficiency leads to data quality issues and financial loss—Gartner estimates that companies lose an average of $12.9 million each year on this problem. And because these processes are so slow, it’s nearly impossible to deliver accurate insights fast enough for leadership to act. As a result, you risk being unable to pivot when business conditions change quickly and falling short of your revenue targets.
There’s also the emotional toll on finance teams, who have to work late nights to keep up, with little time left for more strategic work like business partnering or even basic work-life balance.
To solve these problems, during their session at our Excelerate Finance conference back in May, Monte Carlo Consulting (MCC) co-founders Charlie Liu and Eugene Cheng shared how they’ve been experimenting with Microsoft Fabric alongside the Vena platform to streamline their own finance processes.
In this article, we’ll unpack their key takeaways and how you can apply them to improve your own FP&A processes.
Microsoft Fabric is an AI-powered data platform that provides end-to-end data services, from ingestion to visualization, allowing you to manage the full data process in one environment. It brings together many formerly-separate services (data warehousing, lake storage, real-time analytics, BI) into one integrated experience.
Fabric helps you pull in raw data, clean and organize it, analyze it for trends, and turn it into clear reports and dashboards your team can use. Plus, it operates in tandem with other data-focused Microsoft services such as Microsoft Azure and Power BI.
A single source of truth for your organization’s data makes it easier for finance and business teams to collaborate, plan ahead, and make faster, more confident decisions.
MCC is a consultancy specializing in finance, FP&A, and operations optimization.
Charlie leads the team as Chief Customer Happiness Officer, helping clients with all things FP&A and data analytics, from building board decks to bringing structure to messy data. Eugene, MCC’s Chief Customer Officer, brings over a decade of experience in financial planning and analysis (FP&A) and modeling.
Charlie broke down the manual finance processes that slow teams down into five categories: manual collection, validation and cleanup, data preparation, manual transfer, and chasing approvals from stakeholders.
Fixing these issues often means pulling in IT to stitch systems together with custom integrations and endless SQL workarounds. But that approach is expensive, breaks easily, and keeps finance teams stuck in waiting rather than moving forward.
Microsoft Fabric lets you bring all your data into one place and start automating tasks such as data integration, preparation, and reporting with low-code or no-code tools. That way, finance teams can handle more of the work themselves instead of relying heavily on tech support.
But Fabric alone still has gaps. Finance teams still need an easy way to interact with data, manage approvals, and keep an audit trail of who made changes. That’s why it can be especially powerful to combine Microsoft Fabric with corporate performance management (CPM) tools.
As Charlie explains:
“Fabric is amazing, but there’s still a gap, especially when it comes to how end users interact with data, as well as workflow and auditability. That’s why we believe pairing Fabric with an FP&A or CPM tool like Vena is so powerful. They provide the workflow, audit trail, and traceability you need to see how approvals are moving, while also pulling and revealing data from Fabric. You can build reports with drag-and-drop, interact with the data directly, and use Excel-based templates that feed into Vena, into Fabric, and back again. That creates a true feedback loop.”
During the session, Eugene broke down five ways MCC uses both tools to automate these processes—for both themselves and their clients—along with tips to apply to your own workflow.
Let’s dive in:
When data flows automatically across your ERP, HR, and accounting systems, finance gains a single source of truth and reduces the risk of errors.
Before Fabric, MCC’s finance team had a quote-to-cash process that involved collecting customer information through Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. They’d then spend hours manually reviewing entries, fixing errors, and copying and pasting data into their CRM before invoicing the customer, which slowed down their ability to get paid.
“This process wasn’t scalable,” Eugene explains. “We could have hired more hands and thrown people at the problem, but we made a conscious decision not to do so, because that’s not how we scale.”
Pro tip: Use Microsoft Fabric’s built-in data connectors and low-code tools to automatically pull in data from ERP, HR, CRM, and other systems. Instead of relying on manual exports or juggling spreadsheets, you can build automated pipelines that keep your data clean, up to date, and ready for analysis. That means fewer delays, fewer errors, and more time spent delivering insights that actually drive business decisions.
Small errors in finance can quickly snowball into invoicing disputes, compliance issues, or inaccurate reporting.
MCC experienced this firsthand when an Excel error dropped a zero from a customer’s zip code. The result was weeks of back-and-forth with the customer over a payment that had technically been made, but couldn’t be matched in their system. For a startup where cash flow is critical, that kind of delay is painful and disruptive.
The team set out to prevent this issue by using Microsoft Fabric to validate and clean incoming customer data before it flowed into forecasts or reports. For example, to verify customer locations, they cross-checked them against map software to catch errors such as confusing “ON” for Ontario versus Oregon, or figuring out which Springfield a customer belongs to (fun fact: there are Springfields in at least 34 U.S. states).
They applied the same approach to legal entity names, eliminating duplicates such as one system listing a customer as “Vena,” another as “Vena Solutions,” and another as “Vena Corp,” even though they refer to the same customer.
“By enriching our data, it became far more accurate and trustworthy,” Eugene says. “We can finally trust the information we have, avoid getting stuck in an AP black hole, and bill our customers with confidence.”
Pro tip: Fabric includes a searchable “Operations” panel with prebuilt data-cleaning steps like removing duplicates, standardizing text, and scaling numeric values. Just pick an operation, choose the column you want to apply it to, and fill in the details (like setting a new number range, or choosing how to handle blanks). It’s a fast, low-code way to clean up messy datasets before analysis.
Source: Microsoft
One of the toughest questions Finance gets from leadership is, “Which products, channels, or customers are actually profitable?”
Microsoft Fabric makes responding to these kinds of requests much easier by unifying financial and operational data in a single place. With everything connected, Finance can tie expenses back to specific departments or projects and ensure that department-level Profit and Loss statements (P&Ls) reflect the true picture of profitability.
But to get more usable insights, finance teams still need a way to model scenarios, run forecasts, and present results back to leadership in a format they can act on. That is where CPM platforms like Vena come in.
With Vena, you can build on your unified data in Fabric with workflows, templates, and reporting. And with Vena Copilot, finance teams can skip manual reconciliations and pivot tables by asking plain-language questions like “Show gross margin by customer segment” and get instant answers.
This way, leadership gets the clarity they need faster, and stakeholders can even get answers on their own without pulling Finance away from higher-value work.
An example of how Vena Copilot can help you quickly uncover insights about your business's revenue performance.
Organizations are already seeing the impact. The Association for Institutional Research (AIR) used Vena Copilot to improve how quickly they access and act on data. Their team completed their most recent audit season faster than ever and was able to respond to queries from across the business without the 15- to 20-minute wait times that had previously been the norm. This freed the team to focus on board reporting, scenario modeling and strategic planning.
Few things slow Finance down more than rekeying or copying and pasting numbers between spreadsheets, PDFs, and accounting systems.
Instead of exporting invoices, downloading reports, and manually loading them into your accounting system, Microsoft Fabric integrates these feeds directly so the right data flows where it’s needed. However, the real challenge with Fabric is visibility—it doesn’t capture who changed what, when, or with whose approval.
CPM platforms like Vena fill this gap. With Fabric feeding accurate data into Vena, finance leaders can then get full audit trails, version control and access permissions. Journal entries, budgets, and reports are traceable, so you can see who last updated a number, when the change was made, and who approved it.
And when leadership, stakeholders, or auditors ask for clarification, you can point to the exact source, saving time and improving accuracy across recurring processes such as month-end close, management reporting, and consolidations.
Chasing approvals is one of the most tedious and draining parts of the annual planning cycle. Budget owners delay responses, managers miss deadlines, and Finance ends up sending reminders across email, Teams, Slack, and spreadsheets just to move things forward. By the time approvals arrive, the numbers are often stale.
Pairing Microsoft Fabric with a CPM platform prevents this. Vena, for example, provides structured workflows, so Finance can define which budget contributors need to do what, in what order, with built-in due dates and notifications.
Vena lets you assign tasks to members of your team and automate reminders.
Pro tip: Use Vena’s dashboards to see which budgets are waiting for review and schedule reminders directly from the platform, instead of relying on email, Teams or Slack. The result is quicker responses, faster cycle times, and less friction within the business.
Using both platforms, MCC reduced time-to-invoicing from two weeks to a single day and cut overdue collections by nearly 40 percent. Their data now moves through a rigorous workflow and audit process, so for every customer, they know exactly who created an entry, when it was made, and who approved it.
You can achieve similar results across invoicing, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting by pairing Microsoft Fabric with robust CPM software like Vena.
The key is to start small: choose one process, such as invoicing or budget approvals, and test how Fabric can unify the data while your CPM or Excel-based tool manages the workflow. From there, expand as your team gains confidence.
As Charlie puts it,
“Rethink finance processes in terms of the possibilities. Start empowering your team and leveraging these technologies today. With [Microsoft] Copilot, for example, you can chat with it, ask questions, and get step-by-step guidance on how to configure and automate these processes.”
Vena offers pre-built Microsoft Fabric connectors for SAP S/4Hana, Acumatica, Deltek, Xero, and OneLake, making for a more seamless integration process and faster flow of data. This means finance teams no longer have to export trial balances or chase CSVs just to update a budget. Instead, those feeds flow directly into Vena through Fabric, where the data is automatically refreshed and aligned across systems.
This way, finance can spend less time chasing numbers and more time providing insights that guide business decisions.
Watch Charlie and Eugene’s full session from Excelerate Finance 2025.
Watch NowJessica Tee Orika-Owunna is a content strategist and writer with over seven years of experience creating and repurposing relatable, helpful content for global brands including Contentsquare, Softr, Hotjar and Vena. She specializes in turning everyday product, user, and subject matter expert insights into product-led content that answers real buyer questions and supports better business outcomes.
