Item: Alteryx Platform
Rating: 10
Author: Ava Cameron

Overall Satisfaction with Alteryx

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our Tax Department uses Alteryx to compile sales and use data for filings; to instantly create journal entries from bank downloads compared to our property management company records; to reconcile all GL accounts; to create accruals with up to the minute processing data; and so much more. We had been using Alteryx for a few years before we merged with another company and having so many things automated before doubling the number of shops and expanding how many states we're in was the only thing that saved our sanity.

Pros and Cons

Pros

easy to hit SQL or sharepoint or excel or just any type of data source (those are the ones I use most)
quick for stacking hundreds of daily reports and instantly having a year or more of data handy
outputs can go to any format and there's so much support/instruction available I haven't yet hit a need that I couldn't find how to accomplish
their online community website is tremendous for instructions and samples and news

Cons

in about 4 years of using it - I cannot name something I've needed to do with it and couldn't find a way - this is going to be a difficult list to compile
the hardest thing I can recall setting up is outputs to pdf because there are so many options such that charts, data, etc. can be configured in any way desired - that was overwhelming to start to figure out at first but there are lots of samples on the community website
any other issues I've encountered have been due to IT restrictions and trouble connecting to data sources but once we convinced IT we really needed their help - they've also been able to read on the community website and figure out the settings needed to make things work in our environment

Return on Investment

we were able to scale from creating tax returns for 350 shops in 24 states to over 600 shops across 36 states in only 2 cycles. if we'd been trying to create excel files and manipulate the data I can't even guess how long it might have taken us
a >$500M company has a 3 person tax team for sales, use, real estate, personal property, income, franchise, business taxes, etc; only payroll is not in our department - and we wouldn't be functioning if we hadn't implemented Alteryx years ago and been used to working in it before the merger hit us
the Tax Dir might have some bigger picture observations but from someone on the front lines - it's all been efficiency gains ... LOTS and lots of them

Performance

I already gave the example of journal entries created in less than a second. What else can I tell you about.... I can tell you those 2 journal entries have historically had to be split into separate accounting systems so the outputs had to be very different (D365 vs Intacct) such that they are exactly ready for uploading. I can tell you I used to have some tire and battery queries hitting a line item detail table and they took hours to run UNTIL I asked IT for a view in SQL and now they're ready in about 5 minutes total. I guess I'd say if anything does take a long time - do some research with others and figure out what would speed them up.

Alternatives Considered

We asked our external auditors for suggestions on how to make our processes better and they scheduled a meeting with us and presented Alteryx and then showed us a little bit about PowerBI but it was on their suggestion and their being able to show us at that presentation some clear examples of how we could use it and we were just sold right then. We did look at PowerBI a little but not much.

Key Insights

Do you think Alteryx Platform delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Alteryx Platform's feature set?

Yes

Did Alteryx Platform live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Alteryx Platform go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Alteryx Platform again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

We're trying right now to get more people using it at our company so we can send management documented cases for how we can expand and purchase Alteryx Server which will extend the capabilities even more and across more departments. It's been well suited for pretty much everything we do on a repeating schedule. It's worth the time to set up the workflows. When Treasury sends me the bank download now - I save it to a folder and run our workflows and send back 2 journal entries in .9 seconds. (yes - in less than a second it's finished running)

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT IT ANYMORE

Modules Used