An article from the Wall Street Journal recently stirred up a commotion in the Finance world. The article is about Microsoft Excel. Read it here: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs
A few days after, the astonished author wrote another article on all the responses the first article got. Read it here: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands
The title says it all – Indeed, if you want to get any CFOs blood racing – with excitement or anger, that is subjective, talk about Excel. Everyone has an opinion about it.
Microsoft must have seen it coming.
When Microsoft first launched Excel, the ads they released predicted just how massive it will be.
Another ad read:
Fast forward 30 years, Microsoft Excel is still the undisputed leader in spreadsheets with more than 750 million users, and remains to be a staple in most offices. Honestly, who doesn’t use Excel? It’s accessibility, ease of use, and flexibility just makes Excel the first choice for crunching numbers.
Side note: Excel was initially launched in 1985 for Apple. The Windows version came out in 1987. Check out the history of Excel here, if you like.
Also, see more fun ads from Excel’s past below.
Facing today’s challenges with Excel
However, to again quote an Excel ad from the 80’s – ”The computer world was a very different place five years ago. Chances are, your business was too.”
How far has Excel come to address the current needs of business users?
Here are just some of issues that users encounter in most business cases:
- Data Consolidation
- Scalability
- Collaboration
- Accuracy
- Flexibility
- Security
- Control
Microsoft continually works with active Excel users through online communities such as UserVoice, to really listen to what they are saying and respond to them with new features.
The question is, are those new features powerful enough? While it may be sufficient up to some level of business needs, it still presents risks especially when used for finance.
“Excel just wasn’t designed to do some of the heavy lifting that companies need to do in finance,” said Paul Hammerman, a business applications analyst at Forrester Research Inc.
Replacing Excel
Some organizations believe that Excel needs to be eliminated from the business process. Realistically though, it’s easier said than done. Circling back to that Wall Street Journal article, some end-users, even top executives, will not let their spreadsheets go without a fight.
Nevertheless, more and more organizations are implementing new finance systems to mitigate risks and to streamline processes. Some are choosing to implement innovative cloud solutions, while others turn to “tried-and-test” systems from SAP, IBM, Microsoft, etc. In both cases, these new solutions respond to very specific business requirements – planning, forecasting, reporting, KPI, dashboards, etc.
Organizations need to be aware that most proprietary solutions are close and have limited ability to communicate with other systems. This could present some challenges in data consolidation and consequently, data integrity.
Despite “successful” implementations, end-users typically still turn to Microsoft Excel to provide them the flexibility to manipulate and transform data exported from those new systems. End-users still turn to Excel to get their job done and to meet the needs of management. This begs me to ask the question, is it still successful when at the end of the day, your business process goes back to Excel?
Finding the sweet spot between Excel and finance solutions
At PARIS, we believe that the best solutions are practical solutions – in the sense of implementation, control, flexibility, and user adaption.
We believe that Excel is a great tool for finance, when used together with systems that provide control and responds to Excel’s limitations and short comings. Leveraging on end-user’s existing knowledge on Excel ensures quick and successful user adaption, and maintains required flexibility that is needed for complex business requirements.
PARIS offers the best in class and most compatible solution to Microsoft Excel, and more. We have the technology that allows us to build finance solutions (cloud or on-premise) based on data models that are completely open to connect to and from Excel, or any other 3rd party solutions.
Therefore, end-users can access data that is automatically consolidated and aggregated through their Excel spreadsheet, any reporting system, BI tools such as Tableau or Qlik, or any other existing tool they are already using.
What PARIS solutions achieve is an open, live collaborative system that allows end-users and management to work together from a single-source of truth.
End-users who choose to use Excel as their main interface to PARIS solutions are able to enjoy the flexibility that they need. However, instead of spending countless hours administering and reconciling versions upon versions of spreadsheets and formulas, they would actually spend their time analyzing and making valuable and informed decisions.
