Series 18 - The Excel Problem: Why Your Spreadsheets Are a Symptom, Not the Cause

The promise of every major ERP implementation for the past thirty years has included, explicitly or implicitly, the elimination of spreadsheet-based finance processes. SAP will replace your Excel consolidation model. Oracle will replace your Excel close checklist. The new ERP will provide everything the spreadsheets provide, natively, in a governed, auditable, integrated environment. And in every...

Continuous transaction controls have done something that years of ERP modernisation programmes, digital transformation initiatives, and finance technology investment have failed to do: they have made the Excel-based finance architecture non-viable. Not inconvenient. Not suboptimal. Non-viable — because the compliance obligations they introduce operate at a speed, a data granularity, and a real-tim...

Every organisation that has tried to eliminate Excel from its finance function has discovered the same thing: the spreadsheets cannot be removed until the problem the spreadsheets are solving has been solved a different way. And in most organisations, the problem the spreadsheets are solving is not a process problem or a discipline problem or a change management problem. It is an architecture prob...