CHAPTER 17
Ban Excel from Core Monthly Routines
Excel has no place in reporting, forecasting, budgeting, and other core financial routines. Excel was never intended for the uses we put it to. In fact, many of us, if we worked for NASA, would be using Excel for the space program and, believe me when I say this, probably would make a good go of it. I, however, would not like to be the astronaut, in outer space, when I found out that there was a 90 percent chance of a logic error for every 150 rows in the workbook.
Excel is a great tool for doing one-off graphs for a report or designing and testing a reporting template. It is not and never should have been a building block for your company’s forecasting and reporting systems. There are better alternatives, as shown in Exhibit 17.1.
EXHIBIT 17.1 Replacements for Excel
| Current Use for Excel | Replacement |
| Reporting—downloading from the general ledger (G/L) to get better-quality reports | Reporting package |
| Cash flow forecasting | Planning application |
| Rolling accrual forecasting | Planning application |
| Budgeting | Planning application |
| Consolidations | Reporting package or your G/L |
| Balanced scorecards | Balanced scorecard package |
As a forecasting tool, Excel fails on a number of counts:
- It has no proper version control; we have all burned the midnight oil pulling our hair out wondering whether all spreadsheets are the correct versions.
- For every 100 formula cells on average between one and two will contain an error (Powell, Baker, Lawson, Dartmouth College, USA, 2009). ...
