Excel has always been a tool-of-choice by finance people for consolidation. In fact, it has been widely used in the finance world for decades. It is easy to use and can be configured to aggregate or perform mathematical work among many others.
Excel is certainly a useful tool but it is not necessarily the best tool for financial consolidation. I created a list of why Excel may not be the best tool for your business when doing consolidation process.
File Security issue – You can password-protect your spreadsheet file, but with today’s technology almost anyone can find and download excel password removal tool for free on the internet. (not safe at all)
Collaboration Issue – users cannot work simultaneously with one spreadsheet. To accomplish this task, you might need to break down your consolidation into multiple Excel files and doing that runs the risk of broken links in Excel which can cause a lot of problems. Further, the spreadsheets can potentially become too large that simply pivoting it can take several minutes or hours.
Lack of Traceability– You can use Excel together with SharePoint but still this does not provide sufficient data transparency & traceability. It is vital in consolidation to show information as to who has done what, when, and why those changes were made.
No access to real-time data– Sure you can use your Excel skills for Consolidation. It is possible but is most certainly marred with problems. One of the most critical ones is the fact it significantly affects delivery of valuable information to certain users. It takes a long time to consolidate data from various departments and it takes even more time to fix the issues and recheck the figures.
Excel is a good tool and many finance users are so used to it that changing to something they have to start from scratch with can be a daunting idea. This doesn’t have to be the end of the road. Today, several Excel-based CPM solutions are trying to resolve these very problems faced by Excel users so that finance personnel can finally have the best of both worlds.
If you want to improve how you do your consolidation today, Performance Canvas products have helped companies shorten budget cycle times, increase profitability, manage and improve departmental performance, and facilitate organizational change.
To find out more about how we can help your organization exceed your goals, schedule a free 30 minute demo with us at: www.performancecanvas.com.
If you’d like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview please email info@dspanel.com.
DSPanel offers cutting edge technology platform for business analytics, planning, and visualization. DSPanel designs, builds, and operates with the end users in mind. Performance Canvas was created by DSPanel to answer the unarticulated needs of the market not addressed by previous available solutions. With Performance Canvas, information is transformed into valuable business insights for the business executives to utilize in their decision-making process. DSPanel currently has over 2500 organizations deploying their solutions.
