We get that your organization has been wrangling with excel spreadsheets since god knows when. We get that you have an “it works philosophy” with it. It may not be perfect but it works anyway or that you have been doing budgeting and planning in a specific way for a long period of time no one has even questioned it.
However, the truth of the matter is that you and I know doing budgeting and planning in excel spreadsheets have more disadvantages than advantages. Doing budgeting and planning in excel spreadsheets has now made your work in the finance department unnecessarily tedious and frustrating.
Instead of spending hours and hours analyzing your data and trying to transform it into actionable insights, you sit infront of your computer for hours trying to fix your broken excel links or trying to figure out why the numbers don´t add up or why there are five different versions of files.
To be fair, it is no longer hard to convince finance managers and CFOs that a budgeting and planning software is a necessity if the company is to keep up with the times. It all boils down to company´s needs, their budgeting and planning software of choice´s capabilities, and pricing.
Through the years, I have seen and heard many customers who know exactly what they want the budgeting and planning software to achieve but are not prepared to pay for it or some customers who are prepared to pay the price but do not really know what they want or they get lost in all the features or capabilities offered that they end up deciding to continue to plug along with their excel spreadsheets just as they have done so in the past.
The issue perhaps in these scenarios is that continuing to do your budgeting and planning in excel spreadsheets severely limits your business´ability to adapt to changes and market stressors. If your competitors introduce ground breaking features or new competitive products or pricing or if there is a change in interest rates in the market or there is political instability that has the potential to disrupt business, your excel spreadsheets will not be enough to equip you with the critical business information you will need in order to weather through the unforseen challenges.
Why is this so? It is because Excel spreadsheets come with limitations when it comes to budgeting and planning. Below are just a few of them.
- Prone to Errors
The trouble with budgeting and planning in excel spreadsheets is that your data will be stored in the spreadsheets itself which is not designed to store massive amounts of data. Doing this eventually catches up with Excel such that pivoting a table or refreshing it after making changes now takes several minutes instead of seconds. It then all accumulates making the entire budgeting process unnecessarily long.
In addition, formula or rules will have to be setup in Excel as well adding more complexity to the already overloaded spreadsheets. Because of the nature of how excel works and the complexities of formula or rules that have to be followed, it is very prone to mistakes. A single numerical mistake can have damaging effects to the business if not spotted on time.
- Designed for two dimensional data analysis
Spreadsheets are primarily designed to handle two dimensional data. However, a business almost always need multi-dimensional data analysis in order to find the answers to business critical questions. A more in-depth analysis of data requires looking at it with several parameters but trying to do that in Excel spreadsheets is just difficult and cumbersome.
- Difficult to get a consolidated view
When information is extracted from several departments within the organization, it is important to have a consolidated view that you can just easily have a look at in order to truly understand the real picture. However, this is very difficult to achieve with excel spreadsheets.
It can be done but it is very time-consuming that by the time you will be able to get this consolidated view, it might not matter anymore. Excel spreadsheets certainly do not support quick decision making or business agility.
- Security risks
You can try to password protect the files but that just won´t cut it. With shady companies employing people whose job is basically to steal information or hack systems, there is a constant security threat looming in the corner.
Using excel spreadsheets also make it hard for you to hide certain information from people who have no business looking at them.
The Right Budgeting and Planning Software
Performance Canvas by DSPanel is a complete and unified platform for budgeting and planning, reporting and analysis, and financial consolidation. It affords organization a smart way of doing budgeting and planning through industry best practices incorporated in the system and through robust budgeting, planning, reporting, and consolidation capabilities.
Performance Canvas by DSPanel tries to strike a balance between system capabilities and pricing to make sure customers feel they get real value for money. It also guides customers by making sure they are able to focus on features or capabilities that matter so they they do not get overwhelmed by everything the budgeting and planning software can offer.
If you are looking for a new budgeting and planning software to help you or your finance team work faster and more efficiently, see a free online demo of Performance Canvas today by visiting www.performancecanvas.com or emailing [email protected].
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.
