The best Tech Skill to have in Finance and Accounting: SQL
Structured Query Language or “SQL” for short is a programming language used to query and manipulate data stored in relational databases. The language is becoming increasingly popular in Finance and Accounting as we find more and more ways to use data.
When I first learned SQL, I found it helpful to first think about how I would use it in my finance job. I knew we had many databases like SAP, Oracle, Snowflake and Access Databases; and I knew that the data that I needed to improve my financial forecasts and analysis existed somewhere inside those databases; I only needed to know how to retrieve that data.
And that’s where SQL came to my rescue. I started by logically reduce the data first in my own mind. I saw this graphic below on LinkedIn about how to translate these steps into a SQL query.
I knew that I wanted to retrieve US sales by year from a database called “database_table” and wanted the data to be ordered by year.
Well, using SQL, it’s as easy as:
SELECT year, sales
FROM database_table
WHERE country = “US”
ORDER BY year ASC
Why learning SQL?
SQL is not longer an “IT skill” or something that “tech people” know what to do. SQL is really accessible and easy to use so people in finance and accounting can now retrieve their own data by learning a little bit of SQL.
By adding more technical skills to your finance and accounting knowledge, you can be more independent from the IT department. It’s all about self serviced analytics which is a form of business intelligence (BI) in which line-of-business professionals are enabled and encouraged to perform queries and generate reports on their own, with nominal IT support.
By learning technical skills such as SQL, now you can more easily communicate your problems to other departments such as IT when you do need help. Having both business and technical knowledge can be very valuable to the company you work for (or to clients, if you have your own business).
Self serviced analytics which is a form of business intelligence (BI) in which line-of-business professionals are enabled and encouraged to perform queries and generate reports on their own, with nominal IT support.
2 Great Courses to learn SQL if you come from a finance or accounting background
Finance and accounting people are always busy. It’s not that we don’t want to learn new skills but we always think that we don’t have time for learning.
Personally, I think that this is a fixed mindset type of thinking. If you spend 5 hours learning how to reduce your manual work from 2 hours a month to 30 minutes, then you get a ROTI (Return on Time Invested) after 4 months!
But I get it, spending 5 hours learning something might be daunting, and we haven’t even started to talk about browsing Google and find about 272,000,000 results! (and the first 4 are paid ads). So I got your back and this is the list of 3 great courses to learn SQL if you come from a finance or accounting background!
1. SQL for Business Analysts by DataCamp
I really like DataCamp because I find their platform very easy to use and practical. This course has a pragmatic approach to learn SQL and will show you how to explore what is available in the databases, the tables, relationships and data stored in them. Then it will explore how to make data driven decisions using SQL and how to apply SQL to real world problems.
The more fluently you can retrieve and analyze your data, the quicker you’ll uncover actionable insights and grow your business. In this track, you’ll learn how to quickly explore and analyze data to help you make smarter business decisions. Through hands-on practice, you’ll learn everything from creating and joining tables to writing queries, subqueries, and aggregate functions, providing you with the skills you need to excel and overcome real-world business challenges.
This is the link: https://www.datacamp.com/tracks/sql-for-business-analysts
2. SQL for Data Science
This course is designed to give you a primer in the fundamentals of SQL and working with data so that you can begin analyzing it for data science purposes. You will begin to ask the right questions and come up with good answers to deliver valuable insights for your organization. This course starts with the basics and assumes you do not have any knowledge or skills in SQL. It will build on that foundation and gradually have you write both simple and complex queries to help you select data from tables.
You’ll start to work with different types of data like strings and numbers and discuss methods to filter and pare down your results. You will create new tables and be able to move data into them. You will learn common operators and how to combine the data. You will use case statements and concepts like data governance and profiling. You will discuss topics on data, and practice using real-world programming assignments. You will interpret the structure, meaning, and relationships in source data and use SQL as a professional to shape your data for targeted analysis purposes.
This is the link: https://www.coursera.org/learn/sql-for-data-science
Good luck learning SQL!
