This free course is designed for FP&A professionals and CFO aspirants who want to master the foundations of advanced financial reporting and analysis. You’ll learn how to properly structure and store data, and how to leverage modern tools to turn trial balances into complete financial statements.
Even if you never use PivotXL, the practical concepts covered will give you a competitive edge when working with any vendor’s software, including our competitors.
Each tutorial builds on the last:
- Sign up and install PivotXL
- Create your first data cube
- Use rollups and operators
- Put it all together to generate financial statements
- Vertical Analysis
- Fixed Time Mapping & Monthly P&L Rollups in PivotXL
- Time Dimension and Horizontal Analysis
- Building a bottoms-up business budget
- Performing Budget vs Actuals – Department Wise (Coming soon)
- Rolling Forecast in Excel (Coming Soon)
Below link is a detailed product manual if you would like to review
You’ll find the video tutorials and downloadable files in each section below.
🎬 Part 1: Getting Started with PivotXL
In this first tutorial, you’ll learn how to:
- Sign up for a PivotXL account
- Install the Excel add-in
- Sign in to the add-in and get connected
This step ensures you are ready to start mapping your trial balance data to financial statements. Once you complete the setup, you can move directly into building your first data cube.
🎬 Part 2: Create a Data Cube in PivotXL
A data cube is a multi-dimensional database. Instead of relying on scattered Excel sheets, you can store data centrally and view it from different perspectives.
In this lesson, you’ll:
- Open the cube setup in PivotXL
- Add dimensions such as Accounts, Scenario, Time, and Measure
- Create sample members (Account 1–3, Actuals, Forecast, Amount)
- Connect the cube to Excel both horizontally and vertically
- Enter and retrieve data (e.g., 100, 200, 300)
As a result, you’ll see how the cube keeps data separate from presentation. This makes reporting more flexible and eliminates many errors caused by manual formulas.
🎬 Part 3: Rollups & Operators
After setting up a cube, the next step is to create rollups. Rollups let you group multiple accounts into a single line item, much like an Excel SUM formula.
In this tutorial, you will:
- Start with a manual SUM in Excel (
=SUM(B2:D2)) - Create a rollup in PivotXL with all positive operators
- Map the rollup to a vertical sheet and refresh with Get Data
- Adjust the Excel formula to Account 1 + Account 2 – Account 3
- Mirror the same logic in PivotXL by changing the operator for Account 3
By doing this, you learn that PivotXL rollups can handle both additions and subtractions, while staying reusable and consistent across reports.
🎬 Part 4: Building Financial Statements
Finally, everything comes together. This video is slightly longer because it walks through the full process of generating financial statements.
👉 Related article: How to Prepare Financial Statements from a Trial Balance in Excel
You’ll see how to:
- Load the trial balance and map the measure field to Net Credit
- Use Auto Map to add accounts to the cube
- Map Scenario to Actuals and Time to the current month (or relative time 0)
- Define rollups with a prepared CSV file
- Verify that rollups are mapped correctly
- Generate the Income Statement and Balance Sheet with one Get Data refresh
💡 Note: In the previous video we demonstrated manual mapping. Here, you’ll see automated roll-up mapping. For details, check the description.
At the end of this step, your trial balance has been transformed into structured financial statements — automatically.
🎬 Part 5: Vertical Analysis
Vertical analysis helps you understand each line item on a financial statement as a percentage of a base amount.
For example:
- On an Income Statement, every expense can be shown as a % of Revenue.
- On a Balance Sheet, each asset or liability can be shown as a % of Total Assets.
This is extremely useful when comparing companies of different sizes, analyzing cost structures, or evaluating how your financials change over time.
⭐ What You’ll Learn
In this tutorial, you will:
- Add a vertical analysis column directly inside Excel
- Apply percentage formulas to your financial statements
- Use PivotXL’s Get Data functionality so the percentages update automatically
- Keep formulas simple — no need for complex cube logic
🎬 Part 6: Fixed Time Mapping & Monthly P&L Rollups in PivotXL
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to:
- Load a monthly Actuals file in Excel
- Map each month to a Fixed Time period in PivotXL
- Send all 12 months of Actuals to the cube in one step
- Map P&L groupings for Revenue, COGS, and Expenses
- Generate a fully rolled-up monthly P&L using Get Data
This lesson walks you through taking a full-year P&L template and transforming it into a dynamic, refreshable financial report — without writing a single SUM formula.
Once complete, you’ll be able to upload monthly Actuals into PivotXL and instantly roll them up into a complete P&L statement for all 12 months.
🎬 Part 7: Time Dimension and Horizontal Analysis
In this lesson, you’ll learn how PivotXL uses the Time dimension to compare financial data across different periods — monthly, quarterly, or yearly.
Horizontal analysis helps you measure growth, trends, and period-over-period changes, which are essential for financial planning and performance review.
⭐ What You’ll Learn
In this tutorial, you will:
- Understand how the Time dimension works inside a PivotXL data cube
- Add time members such as Jan 2024, Feb 2024, Q1 2024, FY 2024, or any custom period
- Connect Excel to the cube horizontally to pull multiple time periods side-by-side
- Build a Horizontal Analysis section using:
- Month-over-Month (MoM%)
- Quarter-over-Quarter (QoQ%)
- Year-over-Year (YoY%)
- Dollar Change and Percentage Change formulas
- Use Get Data so all numbers automatically refresh across all periods
✨ Why This Matters
Horizontal analysis helps you:
- Identify patterns in revenue, expenses, and profitability
- Spot abnormal spikes or declines
- Compare performance across months or years effortlessly
- Make better budgeting and forecasting decisions
By the end of this video, you will be able to build a fully dynamic financial statement that shows how each line item changes over time — without touching a single VLOOKUP or manual formula.
🎬 Part 8: Building a bottoms-up business budget
A bottoms-up budget starts with the details — units, prices, hours, headcount, and operational drivers — and builds up to revenue, expenses, EBITDA, and cash flow.
With PivotXL, you can create a dynamic driver-based model where each assumption flows directly into your financial statements.
⭐ What You’ll Learn
In this tutorial, you will:
- Create a Budget Scenario inside your PivotXL data cube
- Add budgeting dimensions such as:
- Departments (Sales, Marketing, Operations, Admin)
- Drivers (Units Sold, Conversion Rate, Salary, Hours Worked)
- Time (monthly or quarterly periods)
- Enter driver-level assumptions directly in Excel (e.g., units × price)
- Map drivers to financial line items such as Revenue, COGS, Payroll, and Overheads
- Use Get Data to pull computed budget values into your Income Statement
- Compare Budget vs Actuals using scenario mapping
- Update budget numbers automatically when any driver changes — no complex formulas needed
✨ Why This Matters
A bottoms-up budget helps you:
- Build more realistic, data-driven financial plans
- Identify which assumptions have the biggest impact on profit
- Align department budgets into one unified financial model
- Update forecasts instantly as assumptions change
- Eliminate spreadsheet chaos and manual errors
By the end of this session, you’ll be able to build a complete, driver-based budget where changing a single assumption (like price, headcount, or marketing spend) flows through your entire financial model with one refresh.
🚀 Conclusion
By completing this course, you’ve learned how to:
- Set up PivotXL and connect it to Excel
- Build a cube and store data centrally
- Use rollups and operators for flexible mapping
- Generate financial statements directly from a trial balance
This is just the beginning. The same approach can be scaled to thousands of accounts, complex reporting needs, and advanced analysis like horizontal comparisons, vertical analysis, and forecasting.
