Personal Projects
Below is a sample of some of the projects I’m quite proud to have accomplished. Did you know that the best part about being a trained business professional is using your skills for good outside of the 9-to-5? It’s kind of like being Batman. Sort of.
I’ll be updating this periodically, so check back often to see what else I’ve crushed.
Using VBA to help automate daily reporting
background info
There’s no avoiding daily reporting. A critical task for all departments, the first goal for analysts is to process all raw inputs as quickly as possible in order to get to the fun part. Most monotonous tasks related to the processing of input data – initial gather, clean, and transformation of raw inputs into usable tables for further analysis – can be automated with a few simple macros written with Microsoft’s Visual Basic for Applications (or VBA for short). No more manually updating formulas or formatting. Gone are the days wasting precious company time doing monkey-work. Just add your data exports, click a few buttons, and now you’re ready for the analysis! Watch the video demo above, or better yet, download the worksheet below to test things out for yourself. After all, sharing is caring!
Assessing global response to a pandemic NOT using Excel
background info
I took a 6-month data analytics boot camp run through Univeristy of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies back in 2020 to help push my technical capabilities. The highlight of the program was the final group project where we had to pick a topic, apply all that we learned, and create an interactive dashboard. While the full dashboard was received with great praise, as most of the components dealt with machine learning (isn’t this how Cyberdyne started?!?), I felt it was best to create my own dashboard that highlighted only my efforts. If you care to see what a CPA does with their new coding skills, click the live demo below to explore more! If you want to see the whole enchilada (all the code, raw data, and additional supporting work), please check out my GitHub repo.
A flexible forecast for early-stage investment
background info
In 2020 I was contacted by an entrepreneur who needed help to build a forecast model for his business idea. After listening to his story, I was sold immediately. Six months later, after numerous calls to flesh out his strategy, meetings with other advisors to vet assumptions, plenty of late nights and weekends at my computer, we had a 10-year dynamic forecast model that was a great companion to his pitch deck. A true team effort! I have made some changes and stripped away everything proprietary, added in some dummy data, and ultimately tried to replicate how well thought through all aspects of the original model was. Watch the video demo above for a quick walkthrough of all the components, or download to see some of the nastiest multi-nested-if-statements yourself!
A student grade tracker to identify technical weaknesses
background info
While working as a graduate assistant, I created a grade tracker that organized every student’s case results in a clean and simple manner, while also calculating all their related grades individually and as a class. Every week I would mark the next batch of cases, update the grade tracker, and share the results with the Professor while the students each got a package that included a full breakdown of their grade with their fully marked-up case. It was a lot of effort, but worth it knowing that the first four cohorts of the program had a cumulative CFE success rate of 88% (with 100% success rate in the first year!). Watch the video demo above, or better yet, download the worksheet to play around with the setup.