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Six reasons to overcome the limitations of Excel reporting

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Making  and drawing up reports are things that every successful business needs to do. For decades these tasks have been done in Microsoft Excel. Now with the frequent use of Google Drive, they are shared between Excel and Google Docs, both of which are helpful tools but have their fair share of limitations. Excel reporting is becoming a legacy system as new technologies enter the industry that make drawing up reports and sharing them with customers incredibly simple, secure, beautiful and easy. If you are feeling the pressure of excel reporting and its antiquated ways, don’t worry. There are solutions out there that can relieve the tedium and replace it with something amazing.

 

Six Excel reporting shortcomings

  1. It makes sharing hard. Excel reporting gets the job done, but often with a few unnecessarily complicated steps. Sharing sensitive data with clients or managers ought to be simple and not involve exporting multiple types of files and then sending over insecure email servers to recipients. With comprehensive budgeting software tools like Questica’s OpenBook, sharing reports is simple and fast through universal platforms.
  2. Manual data entry – bleh! Going through the process of excel reporting each month is a very tedious task  and is typically very repetitive involving not only lots of copying and pasting but also hours of data entry. With budgeting software, reports are automated leaving employees to actually analyze them and work towards improvements based on the numbers. Questica Budget allows for data to upload directly into the software, thus avoiding the inevitable errors coming from manual data entry (see #4).
  3. Visualizations are simplistic. Excel reporting doesn’t often involve visualizations, and when it does they tend to be simplistic and not as informative as you might hope. Budgeting software offers many more types and styles of visualizations that actually bring the data alive in front of you. Leave the numbers to the real accounting professionals and let everyone else get a clear picture of the story from dynamic visualizations.
  4. Risk of human error. When met with hours of monotonous work during reporting season there are bound to be mistakes as all the numbers, fields and headings begin to blur together. People make mistakes and there’s no way around that. When you use budgeting software, however, so much of the process is automated, taking much of the risk out of the typical Excel reporting process.
  5. Not easily scalable. Excel spreadsheets require a lot of manual setup to get them operating in the complex ways they are able to. This means that as a client’s business grows or a company’s budget expands there is a lot of extra work added to the accountants who keep the spreadsheets running smoothly.
  6. Is Excel secure? This is a question that doesn’t occur to most people but is all the more important now that both Google Drive and OneDrive are used frequently in the business of Excel reporting. Because you rarely have a real customer service relationship with either Google or Microsoft, it’s hard to know what your security is like around all the sensitive data stored in your Excel reports.

 

Business reporting software is extremely helpful, scalable and secure whether you’re a small local business just getting started, or a medium to large sized organization poised to grow at any moment. Don’t let the tedium of excel reporting hold you back from achieving your goals. Discover more about Questica by going to our website and request a demo to see how Questica can help your organization today!

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