129|ALTERYX – Passion for Payables

[Andrew_Wilson]

BYU Student Author: @Brett_Lowe, @Andrew_Wilson
Reviewers: @Donovon, @Spencer, @James_Gerstner
Estimated Time to Solve: 45 Minutes

We provide the solution to this challenge using:

• Alteryx
• Go here to perform this challenge in Excel

Need a program? Click here

Overview
You are an accounts payable associate for a large conglomerate company called Little Laboratories LLC. Little Laboratories has 22 subsidiaries, which offer a broad spectrum of services ranging from patent/legal and venture capital work to entrepreneurial R&D and other engineering-related pursuits. Despite the wave of invoices that you receive each week, you are the sole member of the accounts payable team responsible for processing them. After you process the invoices in the payables software, they are sent to the corresponding subsidiary’s executive for approval. Following approval, the system pushes the invoices into QuickBooks and prepares the bills for payment.

Each week, you review the invoices that haven’t been approved as of Friday at 5pm and send reminder emails to those that are responsible for approving them. Some executives are good at clearing out their approval queue before the end of the week and don’t require an email. Others fall behind and accumulate past-due invoices and late fees. Approvers with more than 2 past due invoices must be reported to Little Laboratories’ CFO.

Because you’re passionate about processing payables, you decide to build a workbook that streamlines the process. Assume that today is 4/14/2023. Your workbook should do the following:

1. Generate a list of executives that need a reminder email
2. Isolate a list of past-due invoices and corresponding detail
3. Highlight the executives that are causing bottlenecks and late fees.

Instructions

1. Cleanse the data so that there are no mistakes further down the line
2. Join the data together
3. Use tools to manipulate the data to produce the reports needed
4. Output the reports using an output tool, or a browse tool

Data Files

• Challenge129_Data.xlsx
• Challenge129_Data_Dictionary

Suggestions and Hints

1. Formula tools are great for creating calculated fields (late fees)
2. In order to decide what invoices are due, the filter tool can be useful.
3. For reviewing the solution, make sure the solution file and the excel workbook are in the same file folder.

Solution

Challenge129_Solution.yxmd
Solution Video: Challenge 129|ALTERYX – Passion for Payables

[Sterling_Lane]

Time to Complete: 40 minutes
Difficulty: Beginner to Intermediate

This challenge was a good practice for filtering and summarizing. The instructions could use some more clarification on the specifics, including only inputting the Email Database and Raw Data sheets from the provided input. Since I also didn’t know how to calculate the amount of late fees invoices have accrued, I just focused on counting invoices past due to rat out the slow executives!

Solution Image:

Solution File:

Challenge 129 Solution.yxmd (29.7 KB)

[Harrison_Briggs]

Great Challenge! Loved the multiple outputs in this one. I don’t think the late fee amount was included in the data, but I was able to complete the other steps just fine.

[Braden_Kofford]

20 minutes
Instructions are pretty darn

vague. Still good practice though.

[Seth_Nabrotzky]

Time: 30
Intermediate
I just thought the instructions were vague so there was a little bit of guess worked involved

[Mark_Whisenant]

Time to complete: 30 min
Difficulty: easy

[Lindsay_Shields]

Time: 40 minutes
Difficulty: intermediate

[Andrew_Benson]

Time: 20 Min
Difficulty: Easy but the instructions are really unclear so I had to rely on guessing and others’ solutions to figure out what I was supposed to do.

[Cadestroyer5]

Time: 25 Minutes
Difficulty: Beginner

As has been said before, the challenge could have been more specific.

[Andrew_Spiers]

Time to complete 25 Min
Difficulty easy