Elevate your financial reviews with an Excel template that lets you annotate any PivotTable cell value, store its relate dimensions and automatically push your insights into Azure for centralized tracking. Centralized tracking can later be used to analyze trends and write summaries to process large comment sets of go back and analyze history and development of any KPI.
No more scattered notes or manual exports: simply double-click a Pivot value, enter your comment, and the template captures the full context (P&L level, account, month, value or any value you add to the pivot) alongside your remark—and stores it directly in your Azure SQL table. The template is flexible and allows you to write commentary to any PivotTable, data in it and any table on your Azure server.
Key Benefits & Finance Use Cases
- Month-End Commentary
- Scenario: During the close process, Finance Analysts add qualitative notes to explain unusual variances (e.g. “One-off licensing revenue recognized”).
- Benefit: All comments are timestamped and centralised in Azure—ideal for audit trails and knowledge sharing. (optional feature)
- Variance Analysis & Reporting
- Scenario: FP&A teams highlight drivers behind budget vs. actual deviations at the account level.
- Benefit: Analysts can filter comments by month or account directly in your Business Intelligence tools, integrating qualitative context with numbers. This can later be process with AI for trend analysis or yearly summaries.
- Departmental Reviews
- Scenario: Cost Center Managers review their P&L sub-categories and leave action-oriented notes (e.g. “Investigate spike in utilities”).
- Benefit: Enables seamless hand-off—CFO or Controller can query all comments across cost centers for board packs. This can also be saved from multiple departments to same Azure table, givin possibility to structure inputs for secure and quick processing as comments are published live and without any delay to Azure due to its quick engine.
- Audit & Compliance Tracking
- Scenario: Internal Audit requires justification for key P&L movements.
- Benefit: Every comment is stored in Azure with user and timestamp metadata, ensuring full transparency. (optional feature)
How to Use
- Populate Raw Data (Sheet: Data) (administrator setup)
- Paste or refresh your underlying transaction or summary table here.
- Ensure it has columns for P&L Level, Account, Month (date), and Value or any other comment you need for the analysis of the raw data. This can be fed to the sheet through external sources and PowerQuery.
- Build Your Pivot (Sheet: Analyze) (administrator setup)
- Create a PivotTable based on the Data sheet.
- Arrange P&L Level and Account in the Row area, Month in Columns, and Value in Values (Sum) – all based on the Data sheet preparations.
- Name your PivotTable (default is
PivotTable1—adjust in code if changed).
- Configure Azure Connection (Sheet: Admin) (administrator setup)
Table Name Comments in D3
Server Name yourserver.database.windows.net in D5
Database Name FinanceDB in D7
Username finance_user in D9
Password yourpassword in D11 - Azure Table Schema (administrator setup)
Your target Azure SQL table should have the Data-sheet corresponding columns + Comment column:- PLLevel (varchar)
- Account (varchar)
- Month (date or varchar)
- Value (decimal/currency)
- Comment (varchar(max))
- (Optional) User, Timestamp if you wish to extend the code for more metadata.
- Add a Comment (commenting process itself for end-user)
- In the Analyze sheet, double-click any data cell in your PivotTable.
- An input box appears showing “Month – P&L Level / Account: Value”.
- Type your comment and press OK.
- The comment appears one column to the right for immediate visibility—and is sent via ADO to Azure.
And, of course, this template is fully customizable—just let us know your specific needs! Whether you’d like to:
- Change the comment layout or header names
- Capture additional metadata (e.g. user name, timestamp)
- Support different data types or table structures
- Integrate with another database or BI tool etc
—we’ll tailor the VBA code, sheet names, or Azure mappings to fit your environment. Simply reach out with your requirements, and we’ll personalize the file so it works exactly the way your team does.