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The self destructive charge of the Excel Brigade

The Self-Destructive Charge of the Spreadsheet Brigade

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“Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.” These words open one of the most famous poems in British History, written by Alfred Tennyson, which commemorated the loyalty, valor, and fortitude of the Light Brigade as they fought Russian forces in the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854.

What the Charge of the Light Brigade Has in Common with Your Excel Loyalists

Greatly outgunned, the men of the Light Brigade valiantly charged against Russian Artillery Forces, charging with as many as 600 men as they approached a well-fortified artillery unit.

Knowing this, the Charge of the Light Brigade is less a story of heroism, and more a story of incompetence. Poor communication resulted in losses of nearly 20% of the brigade, and war reporter William Russell documented the destruction, quoted, “our Light Brigade was annihilated by their own rashness, and by the brutality of a ferocious enemy.”

Now that you’ve gotten your history lesson for the day, you may be wondering what this has to do with finance, accounting, or a personal spreadsheet software invented some 131 years after the battle. The answer? These two things have more in common than you’d think.

Three Parallels between the Failed Charge and Your Company’s Spreadsheet Jockeys

There are many parallels between your Excel loyalists in the finance and accounting departments and the destined-to-fail charge that occurred on 25 October 1854. We’d like to explore a few of them below.

The Wrong Tools for the Job

The Light Brigade was a fast-moving reconnaissance and flanking unit, poorly suited for a frontal assault. While they were perfect for capturing Russian units attempting to carry away guns, the heavy brigade was better for attacking the fortifications (redoubts) held by the Russians.

Just as the light brigade was sent to do the heavy brigade’s job, many organizations are using Excel to accomplish tasks that Excel is not designed to handle—planning, analysis, closing the books, and more; where there’s a will, there’s a formula. This is a dangerous way of thinking akin to thinking that the light brigade would have been fine if it just had armor.

We’ve gone on the record saying that Excel has value for some purposes—like a personal budget or other simple tasks. However, there are many medium and large companies that attempt to stretch the software beyond its usefulness—often with dire results.

Blind Loyalty

Of course, The Charge of the Light Brigade documents another thing—loyalty. Valiantly, they rode “into the jaws of death, the mouth of hell,” facing surefire death.

If we could use one word to describe Excel loyalists, it would be loyal. As we discussed in our last blog on the software, “There’s a Red Badge of Courage that people wear when they stay up all night and work a spreadsheet to get something that they think is unique and artisanal.”

However, Loyalty as it pertains to Excel is by choice, while the Light Brigade was loyally following orders as they fought for the crown. There are many other, much more capable, less risky tools available to company. In fact, some Excel Loyalists are so stubborn that they will eschew a multi-million dollar implementation to use their software of choice.

A Huge, Costly Mistake

The Charge of the Light Brigade likely was the result of a misinterpreted order by one of the officers. People make mistakes. Some are costlier than others. The Charge of the Light Brigade stemmed from an unclear order and a sweeping motion of the arm, when Lord Raglan sent the following message:

“10:45. Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front — follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns — Troop Horse Artillery may accompany – French cavalry is on your left. R Airey. Immediate”

Unfortunately, it was delivered as “Tell Lord Lucan the cavalry is to attack immediately.”

Excel users make mistakes. Writers make mistakes, financial professionals make mistakes, and commanders make mistakes. We all make mistakes.

The difference of course, is this: If we write a typo on a blog, it doesn’t affect the other blogs, it won’t crash our website, and it will do little more than annoy a few of the sticklers among us.

In Excel, a misplaced decimal, an extra zero, or an improperly selected cell in a formula may not be caught for months, quarters, or years. As time passes, this one missed number creates a chain reaction, as concurrent spreadsheets are built upon this mistake, and the mistake becomes your truth.

With at least one error on nearly 90 percent of spreadsheets, the only time this might work is the rare possibility that two errors counteract each other.

Winning the Great War against Spreadsheets

There are many risks in pushing Excel beyond its limitations, and it appears that the business community is starting to realize this. With scathing articles on the failures of Excel being featured in Forbes and the Wall Street Journal in recent months, the future of the spreadsheet cavalry is in doubt.

Knowing this, as you push to shun spreadsheets from your financial processes and fight to increase accuracy and security by eradicating Excel, it’s vital to look at opportunities to sway Excel loyalists from the software—which is easier said than done.

As you push through 2018, you need to slowly convince the spreadsheet jockeys that Excel is not the right tool for the job by demonstrating to them just how user-friendly and intuitive an alternative can be (which seems less heartless than the alternative pitched by Forbes contributor Meta S. Brown).

The great war against spreadsheets will be long and arduous, and needs to be done subtly—because no one likes having a decision forced upon them. One of the best ways to convince the loyalists is to demonstrate how much time and effort they can save by giving them a chance to test drive a platform like Sage Intacct that can show them how much easier life could be.

Looking at the rest of 2018, we will be writing many more blogs on the pitfalls of using Excel for finance—as well as its partner in crime QuickBooks—so be sure to subscribe to our email list for all the latest.

Are you Passionate Enough about Excel to Lost Your Job?

Are You Passionate Enough about Excel to Lose Your Job?

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If you’ve been reading the Wall Street Journal recently, there’s been a lot of commotion over a topic familiar to finance professionals: Microsoft Excel. What seemed to be a straightforward article about organizations veering away from the personal spreadsheet software quickly devolved into chaos, with tirades from finance professionals around the world in response to the article. Read more

Real Time Information Cloud Accounting

How the Cloud Provides Real Time Insights for Real Time Decision Making

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Financial professionals at growing organizations face a ton of challenges. From ‘doing more with less’ to ‘taking on more roles to support the company and inform executives,’ there is little time to waste. Unfortunately, with this rapid growth comes the fact that there will only be more work to do in the future, and with the talent gap that exists, it’s unlikely you will have the help to do it. This is why it’s important to save time wherever you can and improve the speed and confidence in the way you make decisions.

The Need for Speed

One of the biggest challenges that growing organizations face is that employees need to do more without adding staff. However, as an organization grows, there are more transactions, more requests from stakeholders, and more numbers to crunch. This means more work inputting data into the accounting software (or worse—spreadsheets), manipulating the data into something useful, and creating actionable outputs in the form of reports.

Speed and automation were just a couple of the eight things you should look for in an accounting software solution. Click the aforementioned link to see part 1, and read part 2 of that blog here.

Three Reasons You Need Accurate Real-Time Information At Your Business

We briefly recognized lack of speed as one of the top challenges in our blog on knowing when QuickBooks no longer makes the cut, but would like to talk today about why speed and real-time decision-making is so important for organizations looking to jump on new opportunities when the time is right.

The Agility You Need

The beauty of working at a small business is that you can move faster than an enterprise. Unfortunately this agility can’t be recognized without the right information at the right times.

If you are spending too much time crunching the numbers that your company can’t recognize the first-mover advantage that exists when there are no committees and sub-committees of decision makers and influencers. Real-time decision making requires real-time information, when you need it, where, you need it, and how you need it:

  • When You Need It: With smarter accounting from Intacct, organizations can generate reports with the click of a button—no downloading of files or manipulation of data within Excel.
  • Where You Need It: Out of the office? Generate a report. On your phone? Approve an expense. Thanks to its cloud-based design, you can access Intacct securely wherever and whenever you need.
  • How You Need It: Slice and dice your information how you see fit. Intacct is the only mid-market cloud financial application that shows business and operational metrics by any dimension that matters to your business.

Accuracy You Can Rely On

Did you know that nearly every spreadsheet contains errors? If you are driving the decision making at your business with financial metrics, you need to make sure that the numbers are right, as an incorrectly calculated number could mean that you are jumping at an opportunity that you can’t fund, or taking a holding stance when you actually could make a move.

With over 11,000 customers, Intacct has a repeatable, accurate, and efficient way of stacking up the numbers, and has the development capabilities to provide the answers you need.

Time Savings to Deliver Better Strategy

With APQC estimating that nearly half of a financial professional’s time being spent on transaction processing—making sure the lights are on—they also estimate that only 18% is spent on control, 17% is spent on decision support, and 16% on management activities.

With all this time spent on basic activities, and so little being spent improving the business, there is a lot of room for improvement. Executives want fast, reliable, and concise information about how decision A will impact outcome B.

APQC found that successful companies have worked hard to boost the productivity of their transaction processing, simplifying systems, reducing the number of vendors, employing workflow automation for processes like invoice approvals, streamlining ERP environments, and standardizing to a single chart of accounts.

If you hope to take the steps to reduce the time spent processing transactions so you can get back to improving the business, you need to automate what you can so you can put those skills to better use.

Learn Even More

Our latest whitepaper, Taking Your Accounting System to the Next Level, explores some of the warning signs, challenges, and opportunities that organizations face when they outgrow entry-level accounting software. Download the whitepaper here, take your understanding even further by reading the 2017 Buyer’s Guide to Accounting Software on Intacct’s website, or learn more by reading the preview of our whitepaper below.

How Churches Can Embrace Modern Finance

How Church Financial Leaders Can Break Their Spreadsheet Habit

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Spreadsheets. Used to manage everything from personal activities and budgets to organizational financial activities, the latter of these poses a multitude of dangers for religious organizations who try to manage funds, cash flows, and expenses using them.

The use of spreadsheets is prevalent in finance, but poses a danger, as a majority of spreadsheets contain errors. Worse, the time spent copying, manipulating, and pasting data is time better spent driving the organization’s strategy or focusing on the mission of your religious organization. Today, we’d like to share with you the dangers of spreadsheet gluttony and how to break your religious organization’s spreadsheet habit.

The Pains of Spreadsheet Gluttony

Spreadsheet gluttony is just one of the seven deadly sins of financial management—joining other common pain points like lack of compliance and slothful tracking—but it is often the most painful and risky ones that plagues financial leaders at churches.

Inaccurate Fund Management

When it comes to managing the different funds at your religious organization, your job includes disbursing, recording, and reporting how the church is managing its funds. When you use spreadsheets, however, you can’t guarantee speed or accuracy in doing this, and the distribution of money into different funds and the management of said funds becomes more challenging with growth.

If you can’t manage the funds, you can’t share in detail what you’re doing with parishioners’ money (which we will discuss below) and you risk the tax man’s hammer. An improperly filed Form 990 can result in the loss of tax exempt status. Learn more about the Form 990 here.

Lack of Detail

The biggest pain of spreadsheets is the lack of insights they provide into the numbers. Even if you are an expert at writing formulas and building relationships between data, this is still only scratching the surface of what could really be measured.

Now you may be thinking, “I don’t need all of these bells and whistles,” but when push comes to shove, you have to realize that your parishioners are more taxed than ever and have more choice in where they send their money as well. This means you need to share with parishioners that you are making good use of their money, as well as knowing when to ask for more.

Details matter, and being able to communicate these details efficiently and accurately to stakeholders, parishioners, and institution leaders was one of the biggest challenges we highlighted in our last blog, Three Common Annoyances Faced by Church Financial Teams.

Less Time Focusing on the Mission

It’s unlikely you got into managing the finances at your religious institution for the lucrative paycheck. It’s more likely you joined for the rewarding work and to help more people to find the grace of religion.

When you rely on spreadsheets and other antiquated processes in accounting, you are taking time directly away from this mission. By automating your processes, you can take the time back your time so you can give back more (or recognize the hidden value of wasting time).

Conclusion

An overreliance on spreadsheets is just one warning sign that your church is outgrowing its accounting software. If you are plagued by extended times generating reports, getting information to decision makers, or even buying paper, it’s time to learn about your options.

At rinehimerbaker, we are focused on helping your church, synagogue, or other religious institution to select, implement, and operate accounting software and other complementary applications. We welcome you to download our guide for organizations outgrowing QuickBooks, to take a look at Intacct’s 2017 Buyers Guide to Selecting Accounting Software, and to read the following to learn even more:

Free up your schedule with cloud accounting

How Cloud Accounting Delivers the Hidden Value of Wasting Time

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Getting more done in less time and finishing a task early. Doesn’t it sound fabulous? Also too good to be true, perhaps, because there’s always something we can do to with that extra time to be even more productive. But why not take a counter-intuitive approach: use that extra time to do anything but work. You just might get more done in the log-run. Read more

More than Luck for Finance

Stop Relying on Spreadsheets and Luck—There’s a Better Way

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St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone, and if you’re still hoping for the “Luck of the Irish” when it comes to accuracy and efficiency in managing accounting processes at your growing business with entry level accounting software, we have some bad news for you. At some point, your luck will run out, and all of the negativity will manifest itself, leaving you mired in mediocrity.

Fortune Favors the Prepared

Whether the downfall begins with a corrupted or overloaded QuickBooks File, the discovery of a fatal error in your spreadsheet (88% of spreadsheets have some kind of error), or some other form of mistake that puts your business in peril, it’s time to stop relying on luck as a business model.

According to the Ventana Research Report, Eliminating the Risks of Spreadsheets in Finance, spreadsheets are cumbersome, risk- and error-prone, and separating you from the visibility you need and deserve.

The report, available for download from Intacct, goes on to note that while a vast majority of executives at midsized organizations (91%) are hoping that finance can play a bigger, more strategic role in the future, too many finance professionals can’t make that happen due to a lack of time and other resources.

Make Accounting Strategic Again

So what can you do to empower your finance teams to think more strategically—now and in the future? Ventana provides in-depth analysis of three goals on which you should focus:

  • Automating Complex Tasks as Much As Possible: One such process that will become a major time drain is the revenue recognition process under the new ASC 606/IFRS 15 standards. Learn more about what those standards mean and how you can prepare here (Part 1, Part 2).
  • Eliminating Spreadsheets in Core Financial Processes: Ventana reports that 75% of midsized companies use spreadsheets heavily in their closing process and 53% use spreadsheets for consolidation. These companies feel the pain through increased monthly/quarterly close time and inability to use this information to make more informed decisions.
  • Improve the Accuracy and Efficiency of Collecting and Reporting Information: For many midsized organizations, the collection and reporting on of information in a spreadsheet is ineffective. For example, the time and expense management process should have workflows in place that can allocate expenses, but even the most adept spreadsheet users can’t track this information in an efficient or accurate manner.

Save Time, Improve Accuracy: Stop Hoping for the Luck of the Spreadsheet

Spreadsheets are great for personal productivity, but when they’re used for complex processes, their weaknesses begin to manifest, and your organization begins to feel the pain. In fact, organizations that have made the move to an enterprise application like ERP are not only able to save time and money, they are able to allow financial professionals to focus their attention where it matters—driving strategic growth. Learn more in the Ventana Report, Eliminating the Risks of Spreadsheets in Finance, available from Intacct.

Whitepaper: Outgrowing QuickBooks

rinehimerbaker has released a new whitepaper for companies outgrowing QuickBooks. Outgrowing QuickBooks—How to Know It’s Time to Change shares the challenges that businesses face when growing, and the opportunities they have to ease growth. Learn more by reading the first 3 pages of the whitepaper below: