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.

Comments

Spreadsheets are not a database

[rsilvergun]

nor is it an invoicing system. If you're a small company you can get away with using it as such. In the 70s they were probably still better than paper. But it always amazing and mildly frightens me how many folks in big companies still use it for major parts of their business because, hey, it's already there and I know how to use it.

We discussed this back in 2005

[Provocateur]

Back in 2005, it was not about being on different systems, but there was an article entitled The subtle tyranny of spreadsheets and link https://tech.slashdot.org/stor....

Re:Excel is separated from other systems

[TheRaven64]

Access gets a bad rap, but it's actually a pretty good tool for its intended purpose: a RAD tool for developing a database front end. If your data is actually stored in Access then either you're prototyping or you're doing it wrong, but if your data is stored in a real database then Access is a pretty good way of quickly generating forms that interface it that you can roll out in your organisation (though web interfaces are largely obsoleting it these days).