Dan Stockdale – Excel, Power BI and financial modelling trainer for accountants
Who I am
I’m Dan Stockdale, founder and instructor at Claritix. I create online courses in Excel, financial modelling, Power BI, Power Query, Power Pivot and Python in Excel, with a particular focus on the skills accounting and finance professionals use in real-world reporting, analysis and decision-making.
Alongside Claritix, I continue to work as a financial modeller in London. I qualified with the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) in 2010 and hold the ACMA and CGMA designations. I also have a BSc (Hons) in Money, Banking and Finance from the University of Birmingham and an MSc in Marketing from Birmingham Business School.
That combination of training and ongoing commercial work is important to how I approach Claritix. I’m not teaching software or financial modelling as an academic subject. I teach techniques I have used, and continue to use, in finance roles where the work ultimately needs to answer a commercial question, support a decision or stand up to scrutiny.
Where I learned my skills
Industry
My career started in management accounting before moving increasingly into commercial analysis and financial modelling. I have worked across a range of organisations and industries, including BBC Worldwide in media, WPP, sports streaming company DAZN, Babcock International in engineering and defence, and London Business School in higher education.
Those roles have taken me from London to Sydney and back again, and exposed me to different companies, management teams, business models and commercial problems.
Consulting
Along the way, I worked at PwC in a financial modelling team within its consulting practice, Strategy&. I built models end to end, from scoping through to testing and handover. I reviewed other people's models for errors and commercial sense – a standard due diligence step. And I co-delivered the firm's internal financial modelling course, teaching other consultants how to model.
Consulting teaches the method, industry tests it
Consulting and industry have taught me different things.
Consulting is an excellent environment in which to learn a discipline properly. You are exposed to established methodologies, structured approaches and best practice, and you develop a strong understanding of how work should be scoped, built, checked and presented.
Industry presents a different challenge. A model or report does not exist simply to demonstrate best practice – it has to work in a changing commercial environment. Priorities move, senior management asks new questions, assumptions change and the analysis may need to be adapted quickly. You must combine technical discipline with the judgement to adapt your output to what the business needs.
For me, that combination of consulting and industry experience is particularly valuable and directly shapes the way I teach today.
What I teach and who it’s for
Claritix currently has six individual courses:
- Excel Modeller: Learn a repeatable best-practice approach to scope, design, build, check and test financial models.
- Power BI Monthly Financial Reporting: Automate the data behind monthly reporting and build interactive financial dashboards that stakeholders can explore themselves.
- Power Query & Power Pivot Automating Reporting: Automate the data preparation, mapping and calculation behind Excel financial reports and build refreshable P&Ls, dashboards and analysis.
- Excel Analyst: Build stronger formulas, analysis and spreadsheet habits using the Excel functions and tools most relevant to commercial and finance work.
- Python in Excel: Use Python inside Excel to clean, merge, analyse and visualise large datasets without needing a coding background.
- Excel Express: Upgrade your Excel skills in a single afternoon with a short course that prioritises the most valuable knowledge and skills.
Accounting and finance professionals
Most Claritix courses are designed principally for people working in accounting and finance: FP&A professionals, financial controllers, management accountants, finance business partners and finance directors. That is the audience I have worked alongside for nearly 20 years.
Analysts and consultants
Courses are not restricted to accountants. Commercial analysts, strategy teams and consultants do much the same work with the same tools. Excel Modeller, for example, comes directly out of professional services and suits a consultant building a business case as readily as a finance manager building a budget model. If your job involves building models, producing recurring reports, or turning awkward data into something a senior audience can act on, the courses will fit.
Explore the courses further at the links above, or browse our course bundles to develop a broader skill set.
Explore the bundlesHow I teach it
Claritix courses are self-study online video courses combining demonstrations with theory explanations, downloadable exercises and solutions, slide decks, quizzes and practical challenges.
Finance context
What differentiates the courses is that everything is taught in a finance context.
A general Excel or Power BI course teaches you a technique and leaves you to find a use for it. Here, the technique is taught through a task that someone working in finance might actually encounter: building a P&L, producing variances against a selected forecast, adding commentaries which update as a financial report’s filters change, or using a tool to answer a commercial question raised by a finance director. The underlying skill is the same skill. The application is the difference.
Realistic data and exercises
The same principle applies to the exercises and datasets. The Power BI, Power Query & Power Pivot and Python in Excel courses use a fictional company I created called Workout Warehouse. Its data is designed to resemble what a finance team might genuinely work with, including actuals, budgets, multiple forecasts, and prior-year financials – all arranged by account code and cost centre.
That creates a more realistic challenge than learning with a single, perfectly clean set of actual results. In real finance work, you need to compare versions, reconcile data, produce variances, change the period being analysed and answer questions from different perspectives.
I take the same approach across the rest of the Claritix courses. Exercises are there not just to prove that a technique works, but to make the learner apply it in a realistic commercial setting. Wherever possible, I try to build it around something you might recognise in your own week.
Created by finance, for finance
I design, record and edit every course myself, drawing on nearly 20 years of experience in management accounting, commercial analysis, and financial modelling and reporting, across a range of companies and industries. The course content is therefore shaped by the way these skills are actually used, rather than by a desire to cover every feature in a piece of software.
Read what learners have to say.
Instructor-supported Q&A
Self-study does not mean unsupported. Every module has a Q&A section where learners can post a question relating to the content and receive an answer back from me. You are asking the person who built the course, not a support desk.
Where else you’ll find me
I am listed as an instructor with the Business Learning Institute, an AICPA & CIMA affiliate.
From 2022 to 2026 I delivered the Power BI course through the ICAEW as a hybrid programme, combining live sessions with self-study access. I have also delivered courses through GrowCFO.
I post regularly on Excel, Power BI and financial modelling on LinkedIn.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to be an accountant to take a Claritix course?
No. Most courses are designed around accounting and finance use cases, but you do not need an accounting qualification. They are also relevant to commercial analysts, consultants and others doing similar analytical work. Excel Express is designed for an even broader professional audience.
Do I need previous experience before taking a course?
It depends on the course. Power BI, Power Query & Power Pivot and Python in Excel can all be started without previous experience of those tools, while Excel Express is suitable for beginners. Excel Analyst assumes some everyday Excel experience, and Excel Modeller is aimed at more confident Excel users.
Are the courses CPD-eligible?
Every course issues a personalised certificate showing your name, the course title, the completion date and your recorded study time. That is the evidence of structured learning that CIMA, ACCA, ICAEW and CIPFA CPD records ask for. The certificates are not NASBA-registered, so they will not usually satisfy US CPE requirements.
Who are the courses not for?
Three groups: If you want a complete tour of every feature in Excel or Power BI, a generalist course will cover more ground – these go deep on the parts finance actually uses and leave the rest out. If you want live, scheduled teaching with a tutor and a timetable, these are self-paced video courses, and that takes some self-discipline. And if you are happy to learn a tool in general terms and work out the finance application yourself, a generalist course will do that at a lower cost. These take the opposite approach: the examples, exercises, datasets and reports are tailored to finance, so there is nothing to translate.
Can you train a team?
Yes. Multi-seat access is arranged directly rather than through the checkout. Send me an enquiry with the number of people and the course.
Not training a team? Browse all six courses.
