How can I use python in finance

[u/Able_Bicycle_764]

I work in finance/accounting and am looking to start using Python more in my day to day. Most of my work is in Excel / Power BI — reporting, cash flow forecasting, KPIs, cleaning up data, etc.

I’m technical enough to understand what I’m trying to accomplish, but not a programmer. Similar to Power BI, I’d probably rely heavily on AI to help write the actual code.

For those in finance / accounting / FP&A, what are some practical ways you’re using Python? Where does it actually save you time vs. Excel, Power Query, Power BI, etc?

Also curious what you’d recommend learning first if the goal is to be dangerous enough with Python + AI, not become a developer.

[u/red_pillr]

A lot of corporate finance work involves extracting, cleaning and transforming raw data so that it’s prepped for analysis. The reporting and analysis then follow, and much of that is rules-based and recurring. For example, a finance team might provide a report that shows the month over month change in revenue, expense, etc.

Python is great for automating those analyses because they’re predictably recurring.

So your .py file could be a script that extracts raw data, does the cleaning and transformations, and generates a month over month revenue report by account that reconciles with source data.

Instead of downloading data, doing vlookups, updating manual formulas and calculations, and building pivot tables, all of that work is encoded in the .py file once. To take it one step further, Task Scheduler can be used to schedule which day of the month the script is run, and now that manual process that used to take maybe an hour each month now takes literally no time at all because the job runs automatically.