Process beats tooling.
The biggest wins in finance usually come from a cleaner workflow, not a new platform. Most reporting headaches start upstream of the report.
Eric Armenta · Long Beach, CA
Finance, operations, and the analytics that connect them.
I'm an accounting professional working in higher-education finance, and currently doing an MBA at Cal State Long Beach. My focus these days is where finance, operations, and analytics come together, and how AI-enabled workflows can make daily decisions sharper.
A few working ideas
Short observations from working in finance and operations. The ones that keep proving useful.
A report should be read, not just sent.
Good reporting answers the question its audience actually has. Volume isn't insight. Clarity is.
AI is a working tool, not a strategy.
It speeds up the routine parts of the job and leaves more room for judgment. That's the appeal. Nothing more dramatic.
What I'm building fluency in
A small set of working surfaces I'm actively developing alongside the finance and operations foundation.
Analytics & BI
Moving from spreadsheet-first analysis to set-based thinking. SQL, Power BI, and the dashboards that make data legible to non-analysts.
SQL · DAX · Power BIOperations & process
ERP workflows, clean handoffs, and the design of how people pass work between them. The same logic runs across finance, audit, and reporting.
Banner · PeopleSoft · SAPAI-enabled workflows
Practical uses of AI that speed up variance review, narrative reporting, and routine analysis without losing audit-grade traceability.
Prompts · Review · Audit trailFinance & public-sector ops
The terrain where most of my reps are: general ledger, reconciliations, close cycles, and reporting against the realities of public-sector accountability.
Higher ed · Compliance · CloseWhat's on my desk
A small snapshot of where the attention is going, updated each term.
Working on
- BuildingSQL and Power BI fluency: joins, window functions, semantic models.
- DesigningA small workflow for variance narratives that keeps a clean audit trail.
- StudyingMBA term focused on decision analysis and managerial economics.
- DraftingEarly notes for the case studies on the Projects page.
Reading & looking at
- BookCompeting on Analytics by Davenport & Harris.
- BookThe Goal by Goldratt. Reread.
- WritingPractitioner essays on BI design and operations.
- CourseDecision analysis and managerial economics, this term.
Curious by default.
Practical by training.