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Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

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Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#341

Post by [deleted] »

sheetjs wrote: post #293
jstandard wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every spreadsheet shared in a business is an angel announcing another SaaS app still needs to be built. It's a pithy quote, you'll get a very different reaction from a finance or small to med-sized business professional. Excel is the ultimate maker studio that actually lives up to the promise of "build your own mini-app". I'm not saying it can't be improved on. It's just that the core model of flexibility is so com…

Excel is an incredible swiss army knife when dealing with one person in one location on one computer, but the warts start showing up when any of those assumptions break. One computer: once you decide you want to use your smartphone, for all but the most basic sheets there are problems with Excel mobile preview, even with Microsoft's official apps. One location: Excel's lack of a universal time (showing different time…

[deleted]

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#342

Post by mtpn »

ellius wrote: post #329
fjsolwmv wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. An domain-specific SaaS app takes all the power away from the people writing their spreadsheet programs. Only one app is needed, a hosted spreadsheet with backup and versioning an replication. The only domain-specific business is in writing plugins.

I wrote this in another thread, but I think the next move should be to create an Excel-compatible spreadsheet program with a few additional constraints inspired by programming. Make primary keys required, each column needs a type, etc. These are concepts I’ve successfully explained to non-technical coworkers to great effect. By enforcing them in a tool, I think you would get about 80% of the benefits of true software…

Airtable does something like this. I don’t know how excel-compatible it is, but the core of data types and something similar to primary keys are enforced in a pretty intuitive way, and basic formulas work fine. Haven’t done much advanced stuff with it.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#343

Post by jsemrau »

mabbo wrote: post #18

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…

Agreed! The business critical solutions (!) you can build quickly with Excel that even non-technical people can understand is the real MVP.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#344

Post by starik36 »

ckastner wrote: post #3

> A year ago, Mr. Bell’s team spent hours distributing hundreds of Excel spreadsheets to regional and unit leaders each month for planning and performance tracking of the company’s 415 U.S. restaurants, he said. Now the same process takes minutes. Then I believe it should say stop abusing Excel. Excel can be an incredibly useful tool, but it's definitely not universally useful. If you're using it to manually collate…

That is exactly right.

Many moons ago large bank I worked at purchased a company and soon it became apparent that their entire business ran on a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet with 30,000 lines of really dense, uncommented, unindented, spaghetti LotusScript code spread over 2 or 3 functions. The kicker is it would only run in the 16-bit edition of the product for whatever reason. So we had to have a VM to run it in because Windows 2000 had a problem with either Lotus 1-2-3 16 bit edition or the spreadsheet itself.

So yeah, stop abusing Excel - Lotus 1-2-3 in this case.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#345

Post by gfolds »

allenz wrote: post #338
gfolds wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but there is a threshold. If the problem is small enough, you can't beat an Excel spreadsheet's flexibility and low startup cost. Having worked with a number of finance teams, the biggest problem is not when Excel is used as an analytics tool but as a financial database. Excel as a source of truth for financial data is truly terrifying. Even financial audits are still often handled with custom data pulls exchang…

Why is it terrifying? I am a programmer and I use csv/Excel as the single-entry financial database for a small healthcare business ($500k revenue). The accountant is fine with it. Filtering and pivot tables are a joy in Excel, and I can still run Python scripts whenever I need (mainly to auto-categorize bank transactions). Most other businesses around here use QuickBooks, which has a proper system of accounts, but th…

Apart from the generic question of the pros and cons of using Excel as a data store and how you solve issues around access control, concurrent access, backups, etc., financial databases have some additional requirements to be properly auditable. For example, one of the biggest differences is that the data should be immutable with only additions allowed. E.g. if you made an error and need to correct it (say you sent the wrong amount of money to someone or simply just had a bug), you should keep the record of the erroneous transaction and reverse it or book an adjustment.

You can try to institute the same controls over Excel, either directly in code or just implicitly in terms of how it's used, but they tend to break down pretty quickly with scale.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#346

Post by leoedin »

njharman wrote: post #269
Sean1708 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the business people can at least modify the Excel I'm not convinced that's a good thing. If they can change the Excel then they can also fuck up the system, and if you fuck up a system like this then it's horrendously difficult to unfuck. I think systems like this look great when they're working, but the second they go tits up you realise why people are horrified by them.

Users able to modify cod is the opensource model. It doesn't lose its benefits and advantages just because the users are not us(professional devs)

It's not so much being able to view or modify code that's the problem, but the fact that any modifications to an excel spreadsheet are inherently running in production. Open source has many benefits, but while open source projects may accept pull requests there is very few which put contributions straight into the latest build without review.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#347

Post by beefield »

One step forward to manage spreadsheets would be if there was a way to enforce relational database table looking sheets. I mean, you should be able to lock a sheet in a way that anything you enter to a column must be of same type, you can't addd random formulas wherever, but you need to add data one row at a time, if you miss primary key, no other changes are allowed, if you have a defined formula for a column, it is guaranteed to be the same in all data rows etc.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#348

Post by screature2 »

allenz wrote: post #338
gfolds wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but there is a threshold. If the problem is small enough, you can't beat an Excel spreadsheet's flexibility and low startup cost. Having worked with a number of finance teams, the biggest problem is not when Excel is used as an analytics tool but as a financial database. Excel as a source of truth for financial data is truly terrifying. Even financial audits are still often handled with custom data pulls exchang…

Why is it terrifying? I am a programmer and I use csv/Excel as the single-entry financial database for a small healthcare business ($500k revenue). The accountant is fine with it. Filtering and pivot tables are a joy in Excel, and I can still run Python scripts whenever I need (mainly to auto-categorize bank transactions). Most other businesses around here use QuickBooks, which has a proper system of accounts, but th…

I'm guessing because of 1) lack of built in logging, 2) lack of change control and 2) difficult to automate testing and verification (because of it's relatively unstructured nature).

Excel as the source of truth for a financial system is particularly scary to me b/c it's so easy for someone/anyone to change entries or miscalculate so it's very difficult for me to get confidence in its completeness and correctness.

Completely agree about analytics and scripting, but I'd utilize the CSV/Excel reports as point-in-time analytics that can be tied back a structured source of truth (or a source of truth I can hold liable, e.g. a bank or credit card statement).

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#349

Post by will4274 »

speleding wrote: post #102
crispyambulance wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Excel shouldn't be used for much other than trivial things Good luck with that, but it ain't gonna happen anytime soon. Many "non-trivial" applications got their start at someone's desk in the form of a shitty excel spreadsheet with horrific macros. Is it optimal for "complex analysis"? No, but it doesn't matter because most things are computationally simple. The hard part is the intricate business logic and the ti…

I agree with that. Modern software development has version control, unit tests, package managers, etc. Ideally we get support for some of those concepts in something that feels like a spreadsheet to the end user. (I'm not sure if it could ever be retrofitted to Excel)

As others have said, you can get version control with Excel by saving the file the SharePoint.

Some huge financial spreadsheets have sanity checks computations. With conditional coloring (turn this cell red if the sanity check fails) these can feel a lot like unit tests. However, these are mostly for business logic - so it's hard to see how a vendor could provide them.

In other words, it's not that excel doesn't have version control and unit tests - it's that the people who wrote excel spreadsheet sheets don't understand version control or unit tests.

Re: Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

#350

Post by forapurpose »

njharman wrote: post #269
Sean1708 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the business people can at least modify the Excel I'm not convinced that's a good thing. If they can change the Excel then they can also fuck up the system, and if you fuck up a system like this then it's horrendously difficult to unfuck. I think systems like this look great when they're working, but the second they go tits up you realise why people are horrified by them.

Users able to modify cod is the opensource model. It doesn't lose its benefits and advantages just because the users are not us(professional devs)

That's not a realistic comparison. I have yet to see one user try to modify Firefox's code. Spreadsheets, on the other hand ...
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