$10B Annual Tab for Spreadsheet Errors?

theodp writes "According to PWC and KPMG, more than 90% of corporate spreadsheets have material errors in them. With each error costing between $10K and 100K per month, one expert estimates corporate America loses in excess of $10B annually through the misuse and abuse of spreadsheets." From the article: "The key point about spreadsheets is that you need to know which ones are critical to your business, which ones are merely important and which ones you do not have to bother too much about. Once you know that, you can start to apply appropriate policies depending on the criticality of the spreadsheet involved."

Comments

spreadsheets are insanely useful

[appleLaserWriter]

A major factor in my switch to Macintosh as my primary platform was that I could run both perl and Excel on the same machine.

Maybe if more geeks played with the spreadsheets we could come up with best practices to hand over to the PHBs.

It has been over a decade since the last innovative new spreadsheet - Lotus Improv. Time for something new.

This IS a serious problem

[omb]

Before spreadsheets, managers used bookeepers, ie junior accountants, who both kept the records and reported the results.

And if slow, and mode costly, they did, by and large have some insight into both the data and what they were doing.

Now, less skilled people input the data and the spreadsheets themselves are rarely maintained, debugged and audited; no is the security of and version control of the spreadsheet-code seen as important.

No wonder bad business decisions are made with this, and with Sabannes-Oxley you can be sure internal auditors will start noticing and complaining.