Coding Solutions for Financial Professionals: Programming in VBA, SQL, VB.NET, C#.NET, R, and Python

It’s commonly known that many, if not almost all, businesses have established processes that range from less-than-streamlined to emphatically manual and tedious. This inevitably results in frustrations for management, employees, and even customers. Costs can escalate precipitously and intrinsic corporate growth can be severely hampered. Often, companies that portray a sense of calmness are the worst off, as they struggle frantically to stay one step ahead of countless problems with data integrity, timely strategic execution, and delivering accurate results. Often, these corporations need to take a small step back, and ameliorate the flawed processes, before taking any kind of leap forward. The key to solving many of these corporate problems is automation. Well-developed automation processes can achieve at least five results. • Speeds up process completion • Improves tracking, monitoring and reporting • Eradicates the risk of human error • Decreases workload • Makes compliance easier Not only can custom-developed computer programming scripts assist in checking data for potential logical errors, thereby preventing mistakes before they occur and significantly improving overall accuracy within the workplace, but also, scripting can fix existing data-related issues, which translates to a significant positive financial impact to any business process. Who wouldn’t want this?! Saving money is always easier than going out and making more money. In addition, beyond the obvious cost savings, businesses have a responsibility to ensure that they are compliant with ever evolving and increasing legal criteria, for example, there is intensifying pressure on companies to prove that they are operating in accordance to minimal corporate social responsibility and ethical standards. Automation processes ensure that compliance rules are enforced, and furthermore, provides fully auditable and completely traceable records of activities, thereby ensuring the same level of transparency. I’m calling this section ‘The End’, since this is the end of you, the reader, doing things in your office in a manual fashion. By the time you finish this book, you will have gone through hundreds and hundreds of sample scripts to automate almost anything you can think of, and I’m sure, innumerable things you have never even begun to think of. Keep an open mind about what you encounter in this book. You will inevitably find solutions here to help you automate all kinds of redundant and repetitive tasks that you do all the time in your office. I’ll try to keep things as generic as possible, but focus on specifics, as necessary. I hope you can extrapolate the concepts you come across in this book, to facilitate all kinds of things you do in your office on a regular basis. Welcome to the end of labor-intensive business processes. Read more