Grant Thornton’s Managing Director of Innovation joins AP Now’s Mary Schaeffer again on the AP Now podcast. This time, the topic is Letter Analytics, a concept Lanza helped pioneer. He shares some fascinating real-life examples and offers tips on how listeners can get started using this themselves. Disclaimer: This episode is not filled with technical mumbo jumbo but will provide anyone listening with some ideas they can use to get started in Excel!

Lanza notes that while most data analytics focuses on numerical data, this is leaving the lion’s share of data unanalyzed. And there’s gold sitting in that unanalyzed portion. Once he’s explained the concept in simple English (really), it will leave you wanting to dig in and get started on your own data – and he explains how. He offers some examples using some Excel functions available to everyone.

He shares the story of how one organization uncovered an ongoing fraud by analyzing the data in the email accounts of several employees. With this data, the company was able to determine that five employees were involved in an ongoing fraud and brought them in for questioning. Two immediately folded, providing the company with the ammunition it needed to stop the fraud and take further action. It’s real-life proof that letter analytics works.

Host: Mary Schaeffer (https://www.ap-now.com/)

Guest: Rich Lanza (https://www.grantthornton.com/)

Sponsor: Stampli (https://www.stampli.com/apnow/)

Credit: Music: https://www.purple-planet.com