5 Reasons Excel Is Terrible For Your Business

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• Business Optimization, Excel

Businesses saw Excel as a solution for easy data management back when it first hit the market. Today, it’s still used for tasks such as scheduling, basic accounting, tracking sales, and compiling customer data. But many businesses also use Excel in ways that aren’t useful.

Using Excel for accounting, AP, procurement, and most other financial processes will damage your business. That’s because Excel was never designed for these applications. As a result, using Excel results in costly errors and wastes company time.

Excel Has Limited Application

If you’re using Excel to do anything other than store data on spreadsheets, you’re hurting your business. Excel wasn’t intended for tasks like capital resource management, creating time sheets, or managing billing. A software tool specifically designed for those tasks will be much more useful to you.

Spreadsheets Are Full of Errors

Human error will creep in any time people are responsible for data entry. Market Watch reports that up to 88% of spreadsheets contain errors. No one wants to take the time to manually check spreadsheets for errors, but even with checks errors often slip by unnoticed.

When you’re handling money in Excel, a simple error can cost thousands, if not billions, of dollars. A misplaced decimal point, typing the wrong number, adding an extra zero – those errors have wide-reaching effects. You need a program that will capture and check data automatically and alert you to anything that seems out of place.

Multiple Spreadsheets and Conflicting Data

With a system using spreadsheets, it’s easy to end up with different versions of the same file These “dueling spreadsheets” make it difficult to tell which version is accurate. Multiple people editing the spreadsheet at different times leads to confusion. A centralized system that updates in real-time solves this problem.

Using Spreadsheets Wastes Time

Excel is a step-up from paper processing. But compared to business process automation software, it’s still in the stone ages. Employees using Excel need to enter data manually, which takes time, and check for errors, which takes even more time. They spend hours doing tasks automated business software could accomplish much more efficiently.

With businesses process software handling tasks you used to do manually on Excel, employees have more time to handle complex tasks like data analysis. This also speeds up the closing process at the end of each month.

Your Data Isn’t Secure

It’s impossible to securely encrypt information in Excel. Even with password protection spreadsheets can be hacked in a matter of minutes. This leaves critical financial information in danger. On top of that, storing information on employee computers means that if the computer crashes you might lose data.

If you’re ready to move on to better things than Excel, check out NextProcess’ end-to-end software solutions. We offer the only suite of software with modules to power and simplify your capital project management, procurement and purchase orders, accounts payable, travel and expense, and payment disbursements. These modules can stand alone or work together. They also scale to your organization’s needs and configure to work with all major ERP systems. This allows users to bypass Excel and utilize custom business reporting that is actually useful.