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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.
well, it doesnt have to be, sounds like you have an IT problem, not a spreadsheet problem
"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," .......If this is the case they need to have that data in some sort of format that is useful. It sounds to me like he is simply looking to replace Excel rather than get rid of it. If he's replacing it with something the company will most likely need to train employees on it. This process will in turn create more time wasted.
Sent from my TARDIS
I would argue that the most commonly used programming language is Excel. But few of the people using it realize they're programming.
It's a brilliant reactive data programming model that makes intuitive sense to non-technical users. They feel empowered to use it to solve problems right now with a computer. They experiment with it, try things, Google how to do more things- just like any programmer does. And they feel capable of doing this because they don't know they're programming.
Within the Amazon warehouse world, I have seen incredible innovation using it. An acquaintance of mine got into development by using it to help save soldiers lives while serving in Afghanistan[0].
I agree that mission critical data needs to get out of it and into a centralized system, but I still feel Excel is an incredible tool in any business.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7950190
It's laughable to read any commentary from anonymous finance chiefs decrying Excel's inability to keep up with "x". These folks truly do not use Excel in any meaningful way. Truly.
Every business person in every industry I've ever worked in (telecom, pharma, housing, transportation, manufacturing) rely on Excel as the glue application for everything. I have to persuade people to use Word instead of Excel for actual documentation requirements, that's how reliant everyone is on this magical tool.
Actuaries use Excel almost exclusively to perform calcs for clients. I don't care who you work for, you're using Excel and not ProVal for the majority of your work.
Engineers use Excel for *everything*. What other application imports and exports to so many different formats, and allows any calculation you can dream up?
You write reports? You write complex reports? Try connecting your queries to Excel and let your end users twist the results on their own. You're not writing layouts any longer, and THAT'S FUCKING AWESOME.
Face it, orgs should roll it out and become Excel experts in house, and use it for as much as they can. For the value it delivers, it's dead-cheap and nobody has an app to match it.
--#
The problem is that it isn't just (or primarily) with ad hoc and custom analyses.
It is that regular business functions are run with these sheets all the time. Business types do this because the are familiar with the tool, and they can implement the process themselves without calling in a dev team.
And all of this is perfectly understandable. Would you call in an outside dev team, explain requirements, and then have to wait for an acceptable product to be produced, when you could do it yourself quickly?
This is inevitable unless considerable effort is expended by the organization to identify and pull these business functions into formal, administered, monitored systems.
A decree not to use Excel at all (if this is what it is) is stupid.
The emphasis should be on educating the business on treating these "normal function" spreadsheets as prototypes of the function that must be implemented formally going forward, and the necessary resources must be provided to make this happen, and suitable reward structures must exist to encourage businessmen to identify and bring forward these functions for proper automation. Without all of this this decree will be useless.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
My (IT) staff and I always joke about how Excel is the #1 reporting tool. Unfortunately, with decades of COTS and other vendor systems in play, the only good way to get any decent real-time reporting with sorting and filtering is in Excel. I just exported my 2016/2017 fiscal year purchases out of our $150M AMS Advantage ERP system into Excel so I can analyse the data correctly. The ERP system simply cannot handle the flexibility i need.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Their multi billion dollar asset tracking system and SEC reporting system involves exchanging excel files. They made a great leap forward by using a common shared drive instead of emailing each other excel files.
They don't even have a version control system, to create an audit trail of changes. The process always starts with "Copy last month spreadsheet into a new name for this month". It is insane. But, on the other hand, had she been sane she might not have married me.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If Adobe can't find COTS software that meets their needs, it blows my mind why they wouldn't develop it and sell it. They are a software company.
The people at Adobe doing the financial analysis work are decidedly NOT software developers. That has a lot to do with it.
As it turns out, programming a functional and useful general purpose accounting and finance system is the very definition of a non-trivial endeavor. I say this as a a certified accountant and have done this sort of work professionally. Seriously, it's a lot harder than you think. People get very upset if you mess up the software that tracks the money. Replacing spreadsheets is going to be near impossible for a lot of tasks. Plus you need a tool that is flexible enough to roll with all sorts of unexpected business processes and analysis.
Despite it's many flaws, nobody has come up with a better general purpose tool for ad-hoc analysis and reporting than a spreadsheet and most finance geeks use Excel. There also is a strong whiff of "if the only tool you have is a hammer every problem becomes a nail". Finance people go to spreadsheets because it's the tool they already know how to use and have available. Yes sometimes there are better ways to do things but when you are asked to get the job done in some absurdly short time frame (which happens ALL the time in finance/accounting) you're going to go with what you know even if it isn't ideal. That said, Excel and other spreadsheets could do a LOT better job integrating with data sources and adapting to the real world needs of financial professionals. Frankly Microsoft (and Libreoffice) have been quite lazy in this regard. It remains an unnecessarily huge pain in the ass to pull data from outside sources into spreadsheets. And even when you can do it it is quite fragile and easy to break.
Actually if you really want to be depressed, you would be amazed at how many accountants still use paper tape calculators even when they have a spreadsheet available to them. Good luck getting those people to move to a custom designed piece of software.