If there is one thing finance departments across the globe agree on, it is the fact that using Excel spreadsheets for budgeting and reporting is a pain. No matter how careful each finance analyst is in governing excel spreadsheets, these spreadsheets still contain errors and they continue to be very prone to errors.
It gets even worse for companies with no strong governance of their Excel spreadsheets as it means more broken links, broken macros, fraud, wrong formulas, and unrepeatable processes among many other things.
While on the surface it looks like Excel spreadsheets is the cheaper option because the company does not need any other investment in terms of technology, using Excel spreadsheets end up being substantially more expensive because of all the time and effort spent in trying to fix the errors and in trying to ensure the figures are as accurate as possible.
It is no secret that the finance departments headed by the CFO are now viewed as business partners in their respective organization. Senior leaders in the company use the insights they harness from finance in making what they could only hope are more informed decisions.
However, these senior leaders usually do no concern themselves with the challenges of managing Excel spreadsheets. They have enough problems at their disposal to even entertain more. It is therefore, incumbent upon finance departments and their finance manager or CFO to ensure that the figures behind the outputs are accurate, standardized, consistent, traceable, secure, and backed up.
For finance departments to truly support the decision-making process of the company, they must move away from time-consuming, laborious, and error-prone ways of extracting insights. In this case, it means moving away from Excel spreadsheets.
True, there needs to be monetary investment for modern technology in the beginning, but the costs of inaccurate data used for critical decision-making by the company are a lot higher. Too much is at stake.
In conclusion, if your finance department is so comfortable and familiar with Excel spreadsheets that it becomes the reason why they hesitate to move away from it, adopt Performance Canvas Financials – a cloud FP&A software that affords your organization the rigid control and robustness of a software with the flexibility and familiarity of an Excel spreadsheet.
Performance Canvas Financials reads data directly from your ERP system to ensure data integrity and a seamless flow of information across systems. With it, you can do multi-dimensional reporting, driver-based budgeting, rolling forecasting, unlimited what-if analysis, intercompany eliminations, and many more.
Visit www.performancecanvas.com or email info@dspanel.com fto request for a free online demo.
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.
