Community Spotlight: Finance Academy
The CFA certification, short for Chartered Financial Analyst, is one of the most prestigious and sought-after distinctions in the investment management profession. More than 170,000 have been certified in an exam that consists of a series of three tests. With a total cost of around $3,000, you’ll want to be prepared before jumping in.
That’s Marta’s and Finance Academy's mission: to prepare Spanish speaking students for their CFA certification. With more than 1,000 happy students under their belt and a 3 person team, they’re only getting started.
Marta’s entrepreneurial story, like so many others, was turned upside down in 2020. Once a successful executive at a big company - one of the largest banks in Iberia - in 2018 Marta decided to follow her passion and pack her bags to start Finance Academy. The plan was to be an in-person education service in Spain for CFA candidates. But when COVID hit, Finance Academy went fully online - setting up a portal for people to register, building the course material in video and working through online channels to get new students in.
You can find Finance Academy at financeacademy.esThe central hub for Finance Academy
Marta and her team picked Rows as their spreadsheet of choice to run Finance Academy’s growing Edtech business.
One of their most popular spreadsheets is the Linkedin posts report. Linkedin is the most important social media channel for Marta, because that’s where investment professionals spend their time and share their stories. With Rows and its Linkedin integration, she imports the data and stats from every LinkedIn post, and compiles a daily report with their engagement on social media to understand what’s resonating better with her audience. She ditched all other social media tracking tools and runs 100% on spreadsheets now.
Rows' Linkedin post report template"It’s amazing how you can virtually accomplish any analysis about social media channels using Rows. It’s complete and it’s easy to manage." - Marta Calvário
Duplicate the Linkedin post report template →
Rows is helping her students too. Prepping for the CFA exams requires diligence, commitment and a structured approach to studying the materials. To help her pupils with that, Marta and her team created 2 public spreadsheets to ace the study prep:
A CFA Study tracker where students can log their progress and score against the curriculum, assess how comfortable they are with the content and what to study next.
A CFA Study planner to help students create a schedule of when to study for the exam.
Because of Rows’s live mode and by using Rows forms, Marta can share those spreadsheets with their students knowing they won’t mistakenly break any formulas, and that each student can run their own simulations on the sheet before deciding to copy it to their accounts.
CFA's public study tracker in RowsDuplicate the Finance Academy’ CFA Study tracker →
Duplicate the Finance Academy’s CFA study planner →
And as public spreadsheets, they are available in Finance Academy’s public workspace and free to use for anyone, even if they don’t use Rows yet.
Marta loves that she can see the number of views and duplicates of their spreadsheets. Just like her Linkedin report, it helps her keep a pulse on the content she’s releasing to her public. And since her audience is made up of finance people who live and breathe spreadsheets, it’s a tall order for Rows.
"The Rows spreadsheet community allows us to find truly valuable content business wise and even useful templates that are entertaining to use. It is great to share finance related templates as well. We're goal is to continue contributing to this powerful community." - Marta Calvário
More students, more courses, and more spreadsheets
2023 promises to be a big year for Finance Academy. As they continue to expand the number of Finance Academy graduates - their goal is to enhance international presence in 2023 - and build a strong edtech brand, they’re expanding their library of courses to ESG (Environmental, social, and corporate governance) and even DeFi (Decentralized finance).
That means more lists of plans, reports to build and templates to share. And Rows to help make the next chapter of Marta’s journey even more fulfilling.
Inspired by Marta’s story? See what else our Community is brewing and sign-up to switch to a modern spreadsheet that you’ll love to use.
