The slippery slope nobody warned me about

Someone posted about using Power Query to generate monthly credit card expense reports and asked what else people use it for.

One reply described it as a slippery slope:

Power Query → Power BI → Power Automate → APIs → low-code software → simple coding.

That progression sounds like a warning. I think it’s actually a map.

Most accountants who end up working with APIs and automation didn’t start there. They started with a specific problem — a report that needed to pull from two sources, a reconciliation that took too long, data that arrived in the wrong format. They solved it with the tool in front of them. Then that tool pointed to the next one.

Power Query is a good starting point because it lives in Excel and it teaches the most important idea: data transformation is a repeatable, describable process. The same logic applies whether you’re writing a query, calling an API, or building an n8n workflow. The vocabulary is different. The thinking is the same.

What I’ve seen in audit and accounting teams: the people who get the most out of these tools are not the ones who set out to learn automation. They’re the ones who had a specific pain — client gives you a fixed asset report in Excel every quarter? Power Query that. General ledger in a format that doesn’t match your workpapers? Power Query that.

Solve the small problem. The slope is there if you want it.

It just doesn’t announce itself at the start.