Stop Using Excel

We have been urging and successfully converting our customers away from technologies that have not kept up with the most efficient ways of doing business. Fortune 500 companies speak out in this Wall Street Journal article from November 22nd, 2017 titled Stop Using Excel, Finance Chief Tells Staff. In this article, the CFO of Adobe, Mark Garrett states "I don’t want financial planning people spending their time importing and exporting and manipulating data, I want them to focus on what is the data telling us". The CFO is actively working on cutting Excel in his department as are other financial chiefs, however, this problem is not unique to finance departments. Excel is used to bridge the gaps between disparate systems in all departments. Use of Excel is particularly common in operations, sales and customer service.

Excel has many limitations that weren't considered a decade ago that now hamper a company's ability to analyze, collaborate and gain "whole picture" intelligence. In particular, if your company or department is using the desktop version of Excel, the only way to share is to pass around revisions of a spreadsheet over email. How many times have your changes been lost or no one can figure out where the original version of the spreadsheet was? Who created it? What happens if that person leaves? How did it get generated to begin with because it needs to be updated with this year's figures? The shortcomings are numerous and risks are great.

There is no silver bullet and every company is different, has differing needs, budgets, systems and varying "off-the-shelf" options available to them. The simple answer is that these systems need to be database driven. Whether this database exists on your company servers or in the cloud. Whether the database is custom or commercial, there needs to be a single source of truth where updates are synchornized and accessible to everyone that requires it to do their job. Once the data is stored in a single location (we'll save the distributed database discussion for now), three more things must be considered.

1. Business Intelligence / Reporting
2. Sharing this data with other systems
3. Exporting the Data

The points above are specific to your business and we've been guiding our customers to the solutions that make the most sense.

Identifying the holes and soft spots starts with finding out who is using Excel spreadsheets and why. Once a thorough inventory is taken, careful consideration must be given as to the purpose of the spreadsheet's existence. We've been supporting businesses around the Atlanta area for over a decade from analysis to implementation to support. Our expertise can be used interchangably with your experts on staff. Please feel free to email or call us to see if we can be of service to you.