Concerned about Driving Performance Improvement? Break your Manual Spreadsheet Addiction with ERP and Business Intelligence (BI)! Introduction

I HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE. WE’RE FRIENDS, RIGHT? I MEAN AT SOME POINT YOU “LIKED” THE SAGE ERP BLOG. I AM A CONTRIBUTOR TO THE BLOG. SO IN ESSENCE YOU “LIKED” ME, AS WELL.  BASED ON OUR VERY CLOSE RELATIONSHIP, I CAN REVEAL A LARGELY KEPT SECRET.

I am married to an accountant. There I said it. I know! This news may be shocking to my sales and marketing friends. Perhaps, my accounting friends are secretly pleased? But before you start to downplay my confession, it gets worse; my husband is an accountant who is addicted to spreadsheets. He can spend hours tabulating our finances and budgets into beautiful pivot tables that show clearly that I spent a significant portion of our food allowance at Starbucks. He even displays the finished result in a magnificent pie chart, so my marketing and sales focused brain can interpret the financial impact of my $7.00 a day coffee purchasing trend (which by the way is $2555.00 per year and approximately the same cost as a TV that he has his eye on).

What’s the problem with this seemingly harmless addiction? You may ask. There are worse you may say. Perhaps my coffee addiction should concern me more? Outside of the amount of time spent, the issue is we never “really” know how much money is in our accounts, as the spreadsheet is typically updated only at the end of the month. When a significant cost emergency arises, say for example a car repair due to someone backing into a parked car. We don’t know which account should be used to pay the irate car owner. It takes hours to update the spreadsheet and information is not “real-time”, so cash flow decisions are made based on out of date information, which leads to a category in our budget called “fines and bank fees”.

Now these fines and fees are pretty minimal in the personal finance world, but many businesses manage important cash flow and operations processes  on similar out-of-date tabulated spreadsheets. This creates significant business blind spots . And the impact to productivity, cash flow, and access to true businesses intelligence  is far from minimal. Employees are caught up in the tactical habit, or addiction of spending hours to compile data into manual spreadsheets to report key metrics to executives. This addiction takes up their valuable time and creates overwhelmed, frustrated employees that do not have time to learn automated processes. They must instead update their spreadsheets! And merge data from across other departments into the “master” spreadsheet. They simply do not have time to learn a new way, and why should they? They understand them. And they are they only one who can create them. Their spreadsheets are beautiful. Even if they are out-of-date and inaccurate the moment they hand them over to you.

The allure of the tactical spreadsheet is often present in businesses. A “good-enough-for-now” reporting or operations process may solve some of the problems of today, but does it set up businesses to solve the problems of tomorrow? When ignoring the pitfall of manual process fails to adapt to the challenges of the future, the business follows the same path. Taking a strategic approach to automating processes to get accurate, real-time metrics is not just a good idea. It’s the only way to get real insight into improving performance and cutting costs  across your business.

Join me in my fight to help break nasty spreadsheet addictions. Friends don’t let friends use unreliable, out of date data to run their business. Over the next few weeks, I will be blogging about our transition to an automated solution to control our finances and sharing the process, as well as the results. Next week, I will share our planning process and the steps that we agree upon to create an environment of change. (Admitting there is a problem is the first step in any recovery process.) In the meantime, it’s your turn to confess. We’re all friends here, so no judgment. Do you or your friends rely on manual spreadsheets? And what metrics should you be tracking, that you are not today? Let me know in the comment space below.

About the Author

Michele Ballinger is the Product Marketing Manager (PMM) for Sage 300 ERP. In her 16 years with Sage and a Sage business partner, she has worked as a customer support manager, product implementation consultant, QA analyst, automated test script writer, product specialist/solution consultant (sales), and product manager. She is passionate sharing the vast benefit of automated IT solutions, including ERP end-to-end business management, Business Intelligence (BI), Manufacturing, and Supply Chain Management. She currently lives in the U.S., but works in beautiful British Columbia, Canada.