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Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs (wsj.com)
Tatyana Shumsky, reporting for WSJ: Adobe's finance chief Mark Garrett says his team struggles keeping track of which jobs have been filled at the software company. The process can take days and requires finance staff to pull data from disparate systems that house financial and human-resources information into Microsoft's Excel spreadsheets. From there they can see which groups are hiring and how salary spending affects the budget. "I don't want financial planning people spending their time importing and exporting and manipulating data, I want them to focus on what is the data telling us," Mr. Garrett said. He is working on cutting Excel out of this process, he said. CFOs at companies including P.F. Chang's China Bistro, ABM Industries and Wintrust Financial are on a similar drive to reduce how much their finance teams use Excel for financial planning, analysis and reporting (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; an alternative source wasn't immediately available). Finance chiefs say the ubiquitous spreadsheet software that revolutionized accounting in the 1980s hasn't kept up with the demands of contemporary corporate finance units. Errors can bloom because data in Excel is separated from other systems and isn't automatically updated.
just use BI software ... (penis breath)
Are you trying to make me BI-curious?
Ezekiel 23:20
Or just not enough money. It's expensive to get a large financial software package. More expensive to craft your own. Excel is cheap (essentially free).
But what TFA asks for is a database, not a spreadsheet. Databases are hard.
Hard is expensive.
Expensive is bad.
Burma Shave.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
No. You're doing it wrong.
A database
is hard to do
That means that it's
expensive too
Burma Shave.
Or to fix the content...
Already have
a database
why is Excel
all over the place?
Burma Shave
Or
One data team
in fertile soils
could wipe you clean
of spreadsheet boils
Burma Shave