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Follow the Money — SQL & Data Storytelling for Finance

Beginner SQL

What this course is

Someone sends you four files from a company's books and one question: is the company in good shape? The answer is not in any row. This is the Academy edition of the LucidPlexus field book Follow the Money: seventeen lessons, one per chapter, with the book's figures and every query runnable on the page. It starts from zero SQL and teaches it by asking the questions a finance team asks, then teaches how to turn the answer into a message someone acts on.

Every lesson works on the books of Clearstone, a fictional company with offices in Amsterdam, Berlin and London: a budget of a thousand lines, a ledger of a thousand invoices, a thousand cash movements and five departments. You learn SELECT, WHERE, aggregates, GROUP BY and HAVING, dates and CASE, joins, subqueries, CTEs and window functions, each with the finance idea it answers (variance and materiality, aging and collections, net cash by activity) and the same move in a spreadsheet and in pandas. Then you find what the books get wrong, save the cleaning decisions as views, build a one-row finance scorecard and tie every number out. The last part covers the reader and the decision, the story, the choice between a report, a dashboard and a single number, and charts that stay honest, with two checklists to keep beside the keyboard.

What this course proves

The certificate shows you can answer a finance question from raw tables in SQL, clean what you find in a way anyone can check, tie the numbers out, and present the answer for its reader without distorting it. It is awarded when all lessons are complete, every lesson quiz is passed and the final project is approved.

Data

Every lesson's Run button, the practice and the final project use four tables: budget, receivables, cash_flow and departments. Reader page: https://lucidplexus.com/community/dataset.php?slug=clearstone-financial-operations

The final project runs in the career-project IDE in your browser, with SQL, Python and charts, and needs no Community membership. Community members can also take the track Follow the Money, which does the same work as one notebook for the whole book.

Start this course

What you'll learn

  • Write SELECT, WHERE, ORDER BY, GROUP BY, HAVING and CASE queries from the first one, on a company's real books
  • Read a budget-versus-actual report, apply a materiality threshold, and say what a total hides
  • Work with dates: pin an as-of date, decide what is overdue from the dates, and build an aging report
  • Join a fact table to a lookup table without losing or multiplying rows, and keep the department with no budget
  • Use subqueries, CTEs and window functions for shares, rankings and running totals
  • Find what the data gets wrong, decide to exclude, correct or flag it, and save the decisions as views
  • Build a one-row finance scorecard and tie every number out a second way, in SQL and in pandas
  • Present the answer for its reader: the story, a report, a dashboard or a single number, and an honest chart

17 lessons · 16.8 h

  1. Follow the Money Quiz 55 min
  2. Meeting the Books Quiz 55 min
  3. Asking for Exactly What You Want Quiz 70 min
  4. From a Thousand Rows to One Number Quiz 60 min
  5. Every Department Against Its Budget Quiz 60 min
  6. Dates, Due Dates and What Is Overdue Quiz 60 min
  7. Joining the Tables Together Quiz 70 min
  8. Questions Built from Other Questions Quiz 70 min
  9. When the Data Is Lying to You Quiz 75 min
  10. Saving a Query So You Never Rewrite It Quiz 75 min
  11. Building the Finance Dashboard Quiz 60 min
  12. Who It Is For and What It Means Quiz 45 min
  13. Finding the Story Quiz 55 min
  14. Report, Dashboard or Infographic Quiz 55 min
  15. The Chart Follows the Question Quiz 55 min
  16. Ten Checks Before You Trust a Financial Number Quiz 45 min
  17. Ten Ways a True Chart Can Mislead Quiz 45 min

How you earn the certificate

  1. Complete at least 100% of the lessons.
  2. Pass each of the 17 lesson quizzes with 70% or more. You can retake them.
  3. Build the final project, Follow the Money — the Clearstone finance review, and have it approved by a reviewer.

Every certificate has a public link employers can use to check it, and you can add it to LinkedIn.

Who it's for

  • First-year analysts and finance associates who have been handed tables and a question
  • People in finance or operations who keep asking a colleague to pull the numbers
  • Spreadsheet users who want to see each move they know written as SQL, and why it is worth writing down

Before you start

  • None: the course teaches SQL from the first query
  • A browser: everything runs in it, nothing to install