Every organization hires analysts who have the complex tasks of pulling month-end operational data in the hopes of being able to analyze them well enough to provide business critical information necessary for sound decision making.
These financial analysts are constantly challenged to turn these raw data into practical and actionable information.
It is through these practical information that decision makers based their action plans for the company on. However, these raw data that financial analysts constantly battle with are not only massive and voluminous, they are also most often marred with errors.
It is therefore common for many organizations to face spreadsheet related problems such as inaccuracy, version control, broken links, and inability to produce relevant reports in time among others.
More on Daily Spreadsheet Battles
- Enormous File sizes
These spreadsheets always grow uncontrollably. They become too large and too complex to pivot, change or even maintain. Analysts must then change them to Access or some other database platform.
- Trouble in Updating
Oftentimes, these Excel spreadsheets contain hundreds of thousands, if not millions of rows of data. That tells you the extent of time needed in updating them. In fact, it is common for these massive spreadsheets to take at least 20-30 minutes to make a single update which can be very taxing and the maintenance of the file dreary.
- Restricting Human Ingenuity
In most cases, the formulas made by the analyst are overly simple which leads to limited insights in the spreadsheet. They fail to give sufficient details to appropriately guide daily business operations.
- Risk of File Corruption
These massive spreadsheets are always at risk of being corrupted, needing costly rebuilding efforts. Broken or missing links and broken macros are constant daily struggles.
- Loss of Time Spent in Analysis
Users spend significant analytical resource like massaging, cleansing and time loading the data. This lessens time spent for more valuable work in analysis because much of their time is concentrated on mundane tasks.
- Lack of Consistency in Rules Application
The trouble with using spreadsheets is that when there are business rules followed in the organization, they can never really be applied across all departments or business units because spreadsheets just do not have that capability. However, applying business rules in the database or server instead of just the Excel cells ensures that all rules are consistently applied and that the exceptions to these rules are consciously made.
The Best Spreadsheet Alternative for 2018
The good news is that in this day and age, someone else has thought of a better way to handle budgeting and reporting than spreadsheets.
There are now spreadsheets alternatives available in the market. One of these is Performance Canvas Financials or pcFinancials.
pcFinancials is a complete CPM solution for medium to large organizations with simple to complicated business operations. This solution is ideal for those that are searching for spreadsheets alternatives.
It offers its users the convenience of doing budgeting and reporting both on Excel and server level as it has Excel on its front end and a powerful server on its backend. This ensures you enjoy all the benefits of Excel without having to battle through the common struggles with Excel spreadsheets as the server takes care of that.
pcFinancials is created with business intelligence capabilities like dashboards, analytics and advanced reporting features providing users with a unified business workflow to any finance department in any company. pcFinancials uses off-the-shelf financial modules that delivers best practices in budgeting and reporting allowing you not only to automate your process but most importantly, streamline your entire process.
If you wish to know more about the capabilities of pcFinancials read here.
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.
