Escaping Excel Hell – Tips for Forecasting and Budgeting

When preparing a budget or forecast, especially if extra funds are being sought, the last thing you want is a major error. If it is found by the potential funder it’s one problem. Not spotting it at all is another. Unfortunately it is very easy to make a mistake using Excel, such as missing costs and getting links between sheets incorrect.

Excel is a great tool for one person preparing a budget for a simple business. As things get more complex, other tools are more appropriate to handle aggregation and use by multiple people. Some of these tools use Excel as the user interface, or a grid that looks somewhat like Excel.

Whatever tool is used, it’s important to remember: [...read more...]

Automating Excel Business Processes

Excel is a marvelous software tool. It’s pretty well standard on business PCs, and most people have at least a rudimentary knowledge of how it works.

You can list data in a simple database, and use the range of formulae to add and manipulate data. So Excel (or some other spreadsheet) is often the first tool thought of and used for a business application such as order processing or budgeting.

However it’s worth thinking of Excel as [... read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell - Management Reporting

If you have two choices of how to produce management reports, which would you prefer:

1. Into a web browser direct from the relevant system(s)?
2. [...read more...]

Traffic Light Charts for Excel

We’ve looked before at add-ins for gauges and sparklines, but haven’t looked at “Traffic Light Charts”. These apply colour highlights to trends, as in the example left.

[...read more...]

Developing Better Spreadsheet Models

There are various ways you can suffer in spreadsheet hell, as these real-life examples illustrate.

With Excel now the dominant spreadsheet system, we’ve already looked at how to escape Excel Hell in the articles on these subjects where understanding the limitations of Excel means there are better alternatives:

• For business processes
• For reporting
• For planning and forecasting

But what about for financial modelling? [...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell – Unlocking Business Processes

You start a new business or activity. This may be within an existing business. The easiest thing to do is to log what happens in a spreadsheet, typically Excel.

The next thing you know is that there are a team of people tripping over each other trying to use the same spreadsheet. Copies are taken and you quickly lose track of  [...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell – Improving Month-End Reporting

It’s month end. Reports need to be produced. The finance team are ordering in pizza to get them through the evening. Why? The only way they can produce the information that Group and local management require is to download transaction data to a spreadsheet and reanalyse it. Sound familiar?

It’s not just at month-end. The same thing happens at other times of the month, whenever any other reports need to be produced. So-called “analysts” are spending too much of their time as “Excel jockeys” rather than [...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell – The Ultimate Add-In?

It’s easy to outgrow Excel’s capabilities for a specific application. The only option is often to replace Excel with a system designed properly for the specific job.

There are other occasions where by using an add-in, such as gauges, you can achieve something valuable which you can’t do with Excel alone.

But often it makes sense for familiarity to use Excel linked to a database, for  [...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell - Planning, Forecasting or Budgeting?

In marketing, there are a number of words that illicit a positive response. "Profit" "Free" and "New" are just three examples

So what reaction do you give to these three words: [...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell - Unlocking Business Growth

Excel's a great way of making simple lists. So if you are trying to track sales orders or purchase orders, it's tempting to do it in Excel if you only have an accounting system.

Then the business grows a little. Two people are now trying to share a spreadsheet. That proves impractical so it is split into two halves. Then they are pulled together to report. Then a third person is needed ....

Before you know it there is a spider's web of spreadsheets, with links that sometimes work, and a whole raft of manual processes to control the business. Sound familiar? [...read more...]

Management Reporting – “SparkLines” and “Tweets” to Deliver Concise Information (in one cell & in one hundred and forty characters or less).

Senior management want relevant information quickly, clearly and concisely. Graphics are a great way. A picture can paint a thousand words.

A dashboard with graphs can convey so much. But a single screen view? Aren’t a few words needed to explain the “why” to go with the “what”? [...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell – Using Graphical Add-Ins

If you’re familiar with my articles on Escaping Excel hell, then I’m often suggesting you replace Excel with a proper database-backed system.

This can be for planning/budgeting or a host of other business applications.

But one area where Excel remains extremely useful is for management reporting. Whilst there’s a key role for structured dashboards, Excel also [...read more...]

The gauges are available under a free 30-day trial from the Camwells website.

Escaping Excel Hell - Solutions for Planning and Forecasting

Financial planning is key for any business. Each business is different, so a flexible system is required.

For this reason Excel is often the natural choice for the job. But anything more than a very simple model becomes very difficult to build, and certainly difficult to maintain.

There can be issues with aspects such as: [...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell - Budgeting

Budgeting. A word that strikes horror into every finance department and every corporate manager.

For smaller businesses budgeting is often a totally alien concept. So sadly is cash flow forecasting. For them a simple Excel spreadsheet could transform their business, giving them forward visibility of issues and the time to avoid therm.  But as they grow ....

Many larger businesses still use Excel. Imagine running 300 cost centres across a £250m business that had changed from manufacturing to product/service projects in just a few short years. I've seen it and helped replace it: [...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell – Processes Desperately Seeking Automation (Update)

Are your systems trying to pull your business apart? Or are they pushing in the same direction?

A month ago I wrote an article entitled "Escaping Excel Hell – Processes Desperately Seeking Automation". This talked about business analysts not having the time to analyse and add value to the business, as they tend to have to spend too much as "Excel jockeys".[...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell - Useful Add-Ins

Excel is a powerful business tool, but there are times when it is used when there are much better solutions.

There are also times when third party add-ins can significantly enhance it. [...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell – Processes Desperately Seeking Automation

A chat over a pint recently reminded me that many businesses still have lots of Excel-based processes, including reporting, that are inefficient and prone to error.

In many cases highly qualified and expensive “Excel jockeys” are spending most of their time manipulating data. Automation would let them be their job title – “business analysts” - who add proper value to the business.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of replacing Excel with [...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell - Reporting

Excel has many useful features, including different types of graphs.

But there are two graphical tools that have only more recently become available as add-ins to more clearly portray information in management reports:

[...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell - Add-Ins for Excel

In an earlier article I mentioned that there are three principle ways to escape Excel hell.

The first is to make better use of the version you have, or upgrade to Excel 2010.

The second is to replace it with a database or specialist software such as budgeting/reporting.

The third is to use add-ins or integration. Looking at add-ins, there are several that are worth evaluating: [...read more...]

Escaping Excel Hell - Forecasting and Budgeting

What's the most common forecasting and budgeting tool? Undoubtably Excel. Whilst it is a powerful and useful tool, that will inevitably be loaded on every "contributor's" PC, forecasting is probably the main example of Excel Hell.

Whilst I was in industry, newly qualified, I was compiling the annual budget and managed to miss out two employees from the SUM function for their department's salary expense. Their annual salary was more than half the total company contingency. I had to explain this to the Board and the departmental manager in every month's management accounts commentary, until I managed to get agreement to formally use the contingency for the purpose. Ouch, that was painful! [...read more...]