Case Study: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology saves 15 hours/month on expense allocations with Alteryx

Hkust Saves 15 Hours/Month with Code Free Expense Allocation Model

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) faced a bottleneck in its Finance Office: an expense-allocation model for mandatory UGC reporting built in Excel with over one million complex formulas across 20–30 worksheets. The spreadsheet struggled with 50–60k rows, ran slowly (originally ~1 hour, later reduced to 3 minutes with VBA), and any multi-dimensional change required 1–2 man-days to implement, contributing to at least 14 hours of monthly manual work.

Scorpio Wong rebuilt the process in Alteryx Designer after two days of training and about a week of development, creating a workflow that pulls data from the FMS and Oracle (ODBC), maps and prepares data, performs allocation calculations, summarizes results and outputs to Excel. The new solution was handed to the Finance team, saving about 15 hours per month, enabling non-technical staff to maintain rules, creating repeatable and transparent workflows, freeing ISO capacity for other projects, and enabling future plans for budgeting simulations and automation via Alteryx Server.

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Scorpio Wong

System Analyst, Information Systems Office