She was a senior accountant. Good at the job. Bored.

Not because accounting is boring — it isn’t, not if you’re doing the right parts. But she spent most of her time on reconciliations and report assembly, and she knew it could be done differently.

She started with Power Query. Then Python. Then SQL. Three years later she’s a data analyst, $20K more per year, doing work she finds genuinely interesting.

The part of that story that usually gets left out: the automations didn’t just save her time. They showed her what she was capable of.

I think about this when I’m building something that feels small — a reconciliation that saves two hours a week, a report that runs automatically instead of manually. The immediate value is obvious. But the person who builds it also learns something real: how data flows between systems, where it breaks, what the process actually does versus what everyone assumes it does.

That knowledge compounds.

If you’re in accounting and curious about automation but haven’t started — Power Query is still a good entry point. It lives in Excel, which you’re already using. It removes the biggest barrier (learning a new environment) while teaching the most useful skill (thinking about data transformation as something repeatable and predictable).

You might save a few hours a week.

You might also discover what you actually want to be working on.

Both are good outcomes.