Escape the clutches of ‘Excel Hell’
If you work with numbers or finances, there’s a good chance you’re heavily invested in Microsoft Excel. It has been the dominant player for many decades and continues to play a major role for companies of all sizes. However, at a certain scale of computation, Excel starts to hit its limits. When you’re trying to pull data from various sources, calculate complex permutations in real-time, or visualise the key insights available, you can quickly find yourself in ‘Excel hell’.
It’s time to free yourself from that tyranny and move to a dedicated Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) solution that can not only handle complexity, but harness it to its full potential.
Common challenges
Extreme complexity
As the complexity within your business grows, Excel starts to hit its limits, slowing down your reporting and stunting your business’s growth.
Spreadsheets have limitations
While spreadsheets are powerful tools for simple calculations, they’re not well suited to complex multivariate calculations that must ingest and make sense of different data sources. This limitation greatly reduces your ability to perform intricate analysis and harms your ability to maximize benefits from your internal data.
Your business is at risk of being overwhelmed
When your tools limit what is possible with your data, you give up a lot in terms of opportunity cost. You complexity is what defines you, and removing parts of it may lead to ignoring things that are uniquely essential. Competitors that can harness their complexity more efficiently will make better decisions and you’re likely to be left behind.
A dynamic, functional database solution
Cubewise, along with IBM Planning Analytics / TM1, offers a highly sophisticated and powerful FP&A solution that can harness all of your company’s complexity and escape the self-imposed limits of spreadsheets.
Our offering is industrial in its scale and can provide an immense amount of computational agility that allows for highly intricate and accurate analysis. The end result? You get the insights you need to stay ahead of the rest.
Version control
Collaborating on massive spreadsheets requires tedious version control that not only invites errors, but frustrates everyone involved.
v59.3 Final (Final Final)
We all know the struggles of passing spreadsheets back and forth when you’re trying to pull data from different people and different divisions who are all on different timelines. It creates a hellish task for the unfortunate person trying to finalize the spreadsheet. No-one wants to spend their time endlessly reconciling figures and trying to bring order to chaos!
Unwanted errors and omissions
Challenging version control processes invite human errors and can lead to omissions and mistakes that don’t get picked up until it’s too late. Miscommunication and misunderstandings reign supreme and it requires a lot of duplicated effort to track down mistakes, correct them in multiple places and come to some sort of comfort regarding the accuracy of numbers.
A single source of truth
Cubewise can help you harness the magic of IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 to create a single source of truth that everyone can collaborate on. Instead of passing spreadsheets around, work on a common platform that aggregates and combines all your data sources in one place in real time.
Escape the hell of changing formats, timelines and redoing work. Instead, use a tool that enables true real-time collaboration.
Transparency
Excel doesn’t offer the intuitive drill-down transparency that managers need to dig into numbers with the requisite detail.
Lack of granularity
Within an Excel spreadsheet, you may have one level of detail available to you if you’re willing to parse a complex formula and dig for an answer. But often this friction and limitation means you can’t go much beyond the surface level. This lack of granularity greatly degrades your ability to glean valuable insights and results in sub-optimal decisions that are made from one or more levels of abstraction too high.
Incorrect insights drawn
When you don’t have the level of granularity you need to truly understand a specific number, you can easily draw an incorrect insight or make an incomplete assumption based on what you see on the surface level. This creates confusion around true root causes and harms your ability to make truly informed decisions. You have the data you need, but you’re just not harnessing it because it gets lost in its own complexity.
Drill-down transparency
With IBM Planning Analytics / TM1, Cubewise can give you infinite levels of drill-down transparency at the click of a button. Instantly dig into any number to understand exactly where it comes from at any level of complexity. This ability provides objective proof that can be used to shape strategy and operations – and inform decision-making.
You don’t have to feel stuck with Excel
You don’t have to grin and bear the limitations of Microsoft Excel – there are much more powerful solutions out there. Cubewise can help you nurture a dynamic new tool set that delivers fantastic performance, exceptional transparency and seamless collaboration. All of this while harnessing the complexity of your organization rather than just paying lip service to it.
Spreadsheets have passed their best-before date and there’s a new sheriff in town. It’s time to move on to the most dynamic and sophisticated FP&A solution out there.
Talk to us today and let’s overcome the challenge together.
When a system is unable to adapt to changing business circumstances, it can be tremendously frustrating for all who work with it. Things must go on, of course, and so users will resort to building tedious workarounds, simplifications and shortcuts that only serve to kick the can down the road.
Don’t accept that your business processes are incapable of adapting to fast-moving market changes. Contact us to find out how easy it can be to implement efficient and practical planning, reporting and forecasting workflows.
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