How to Know if You’ve Outgrown Excel for Budgeting and Planning

If you have a love/hate relationship with Excel, you’re not alone.

Roughly 90% of companies with 50-200 employees use it to budget and plan. And while spreadsheets seem tailor-made for finance, they’re really static, time-draining roadblocks.

Here are a few signs it’s time to stop the spreadsheet madness and look closely at Sage Intacct, a powerful but easy-to-use-and-deploy budgeting and planning solution for smaller companies.

You're Burning the Midnight Oil

You have a management meeting tomorrow, and your team wants answers about your company’s financial and operational performance. You’re going to waste a night—or worse, a Sunday—dumping data into Excel, cutting, pasting, rolling data up, updating formulas and links, building and updating forecasts and models, and emailing files.

And after all that time and effort, what are you left with? Data that’s probably full of mistakes—and outdated by the time your meeting starts.

Linda Knows You Make More Money Than Her

Budgets usually include sensitive data like salary information. If you distribute files through email or shared drives, you’re risking unauthorized people seeing information that doesn’t concern them.

Jim—and Only Jim—Understands the Model

You have complex forecasting and what-if models, and only one person in the company knows how it works. What happens when that person leaves? The expense of hiring and training a new team member to diagnose, understand, and update the models would be significant.

You're the Bottleneck for Budgets

Using Excel and email to send spreadsheets means maintaining distribution lists and weeding through emails to find budgets. Everyone comes to you for the smallest things because they don’t think they have the right data, can’t find what they need, or want you to update something.

Learn More

We’re just getting started. To learn more, download our free eBook, 8 Signs You Have Outgrown Excel for Budgeting and Planning. You’ll understand how to streamline your planning, increase collaboration, and run a more strategic process—without Excel.