What is scarier than running your quickly growing business on Excel?
Excel worked for you back when you were first starting out your business, but now that you are trying to do complex, collaborative planning, forecasting and budgeting, it is nearly impossible. Excel is a great spreadsheet program and many people love it because it is familiar and easy to operate. It is definitely feasible to run your business on excel, but is it really the best solution? If you are interested in getting rid of Excel headaches and escaping the chaos of infinitely interlocking spreadsheets, cascading scenarios, formula clash and unseen errors then you might be interested in reading this free white paper. This white paper titled, The Nine Circles of Excel Hell was published by Adaptive Planning, a partner of InnoVergent. Learn why Corporate Performance Management belongs in the cloud.
Here are the Nine Circles of Excel Hell that are covered in the white paper…
- Circle One: OOPS!
- Excel is delicate. In a shared network of spreadsheets, it’s extremely easy for people to delete rows and cells and break formulas and links. Excel just is not made for sharing, and accidental deletions are behind some of the worst Excel-related disasters.
- Circle Two: CRUSH
- Excel is a tremendously difficult to consolidate. How many finance professionals relish the idea of spending weeks consolidating 50+ departmental plans into a single master plan? And as for trying to produce a rolling forecast with anything like the frequency the business needs, well you tell me…
- Circle Three: BRAIN DRAIN
- Excel wastes so much time. Your team didn’t spend years earning accountancy degrees and MBAs and honing their strategic analytical skills to spend half their professional lives collecting and consolidating spreadsheets. It’s soul-destroying (and business-inhibiting).
- Circle Four: FINGER IN THE AIR
- Excel is not good for real-time data. It can only ever provide a historical snapshot of the numbers at a single point in time. Result: you’re always chasing after “the latest number” for anyone who needs to know the current position against the plan, budget or forecast.
- Circle Five: IMPORT DUTIES
- It’s hard to get data into Excel. If you spend hours arduously exporting operational data from your GL, Payroll, Purchasing or other systems and manually configuring it in Excel, you’ll know there has to be an easier way.
- Circle Six: GROUP GROPE
- Excel is many things but it’s not a management information system. It may be serviceable for analytics, as long as they’re just for you. But if you want senior executives and departmental managers to have management dashboards and run their own reports then Excel is not your friend.
- Cirlce Seven: FLATLAND
- Excel is so two-dimensional. If you want to model something like profitability by product line, then Excel is great. But if you want everyone to be able to model something like the impact of a 5% pay raise to a single department – and understand how it will impact every department as well as the P&L, Cash Flow and Balance Sheet – you’re in for a world of hurt. The more dimensions your data has, the less you want to wrestle with it in Excel.
- Circle Eight: WHODUNIT
- When you have a lot of people updating an Excel spreadsheet, it becomes impossible tell where changes have been made, who made them, and when. The audit trail goes cold fast – and that’s not good for governance, efficiency or investigating the source of mistakes and inaccuracies.
- Circle Nine: GLOBAL CHALLENGE
- Excel is frustrating enough when you’re only dealing in one currency and one fiscal regime. If you have to take into account multiple currencies, exchange rate fluctuations and the vagaries of national and international taxation, your consolidation, forecasting, budgeting, and reporting activities enter a whole new dimension of complexity. One for which Excel is eminently unsuited.
With CPM software in the cloud, you can escape the nine circles of Excel Hell and make your next planning cycle fast, accurate and utterly pain-free. Contact Us to learn more about Adaptive Planning and how to escape Excel Hell.
Click Here to Download the 9 Circles of Excel Hell
