Even with all the new technology, spreadsheets are still the most relied upon tool in Finance. But there are certain situations where you should use something else.
Here are three scenarios where using spreadsheets can lead to time-consuming — and even costly — errors:
1. The spreadsheet is extremely large. Reason: The typical spreadsheet contains errors in 4% of its cells. So the larger your spreadsheet, the greater the chance it’s not correct.
2. Data needs to be hidden from some of the readers. In this case, spreadsheets don’t offer the greatest privacy of your data or your calculations.
3. You believe you’ll have to enlarge the model or database significantly — or make it available to many other people. Scalability is tricky, and it’s not easy to enlarge a database of 2,000 to a database of 200,000.