$16bn health agency managed finances with Excel spreadsheet.
$16bn health agency managed finances with Excel spreadsheet.
It's just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP
It's just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP
Is SAP supposed to be an upgrade?
Only those with no experience in corporate finance will find this surprising.
Excel is a powerful tool. The only ones who ridicule it are idiots who don't understand anything.
It’s a powerful tool that you shouldn’t use as a book keeping tool and ledger for a company that manages $16B. And I’ve worked on a trading floor of a big energy company. Excel was only used within departments as a tool for the employees not as the entire companies financial administration.
Excel is a fantastic tool. It is however not a database.
Anything Turing-complete is a powerful tool, but the reason people are reacting negatively is because of how much of the wrong tool it is.
- Does an excel-based solution offer adequate runtime performance? No
- Does an excel-based solution offer adequate write concurrency? No
- Does an excel-based solution offer appropriate data durability guarantees? No
Basically the only saving grace of Excel-based solutions is that they are built in tools that finance workers comprehend, and that is quite simply not enough. To base systems at this scale on Excel is criminally negligent.
You can do almost everything with excel. Should you do almost everything with excel? Definitely not.
Is it powerful? Yes
Is it fast when dealing with large volume of data? No
Are the "powerful" features intuitive to new users? Also no.
Source: I use Excel, Python, SQL for job
au contraire. We know the abuse Excel has to go through. And MS even added features to make abusing it easier.
abuse means incorrect use here. incorrect means, there are better tools for the job.
It's not... Try to write a formula range which covers only lower half of the column which is typical setup in summing numbers( avoiding headers ), limits in columns and records, ever changing formats across versions... You asking for a disaster to happen which happens very often
Try to write a formula range which covers only lower half of the column which is typical setup in summing numbers( avoiding headers )
You can literally label ranges to use them as variables in Excel formulae, not to mention Excel Tables has more operations and features than you'll ever need.
limits in columns and records
Unless you are working with an unfiltered, un-aggregated ledger dump straight out of your database (in which case you shouldn't be let anywhere near an office computer), it's rather hard to cross 1M+ rows and 16.4k columns in corporate finance.
ever changing formats across versions
The .xlsx format was introduced in 2007 (18 years ago) and hasn't changed since. Not to mention you can still use all kinds of plaintext formats whenever you want.
It's just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP
How does erotic role play help tame Excel?
Honestly, that's fine. This may be a wild take, but they grew and their usage of excel obviously didn't hold them back, what's the issue?
Excel isn't a problem unless all of it was done on one sheet and the only function used was sum()
Should have used three spreadsheets. Excel tends to run slowly when a spreadsheet has more than a million cells in it.
That depends on spending articles, not on sum amount. Maybe their accounting is as simple as: 10bn income, 2bn to steal, 3 for salaries, 1 for medicaments and machinery, rest for advertisements.
You don't need super-pooper software for that.
Even if their spending is that simple in terms of categories, it's almost certain their breakdown within each category is definitely quite a bit more complex. Hell, my wife runs her own therapy practice with just herself and she talks about how obnoxious dealing with insurance is for billing all the time.
Yeah, it depends entirely on how many things you're tracking and how many people need to access it. It's probably not the right tool here, but sometimes it just is.
Using it to share data can be a nightmare, especially since different departments might look at that data in various ways and want their own formats. I work for a Fortune 500 company that, at least at my level of management, emailing around attached full spreadsheets of daily data rather than have a centralized database. I've fought it for years, but it's what the higher ups want...stupid.
Even better when Microsoft puts out improvements like 365 and OneDrive that break certain functions, then depreciates Excel itself. God I hate the cloud.
Probably should get a dedicated ERP system, mainly to just have official support.
But anybody in finance (like me) knows that everybody from low level accounting assistants, to CBOs use excel daily, even if they have an ERP system. For instance, the one I am using is complete shit with outrageous inexcusable 'features' (can't even describe them because they sound made up). So we all just export data to excel so we can format the reports/data into an actual useful format.
Also in finance, hate excel, use python for everything, all my scripts still end with pd.to_excel() because I'm not the only person on the company.
Interesting, never thought about using python as an excel replacement. Definitely wouldn't work in my current work setting. But I just started taking a python class and I'll have to keep this in mind.