It’s just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP
Is SAP supposed to be an upgrade?
SAP is super strict at least, it will just ignore you. Excel will let you fuck everything or help you in doing so.
Lol my company has a “no sort” policy. Many key docs just self destruct if you sort.
Can you not export to excel? Tbh Im new to it and it is so all encompassing I am basically lurking around outside
You can copy and paste values to another workbook and sort but it’ll kill almost all the useful information. We’ve got these massive docs that reference numerous tabs and populate parent+children lines. It’s an absolute mess and takes 6 months of training, I look at it as job security lol
Surely it would be cheaper to hire a dev for 6 months to put it into a proper database.
Oh god, my training has been trial and error
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I mean, it does its best doing that currently.
Just goes to show that a spreadsheet is a very powerful tool.🤣
You could run empires on the back of a spreadsheet.
You absolutely shouldn’t, it’s nearly the worst option you have available, but you could.
It’s not the worst option available, it might not be the cleanest solution, but it does offer a level of flexibility if you have an in-depth understanding of key operational (or financial) business processes.
Shift+F9… annnnd, the data is gone
Not if there is a BACKUP folder with daily copies of all your spreadsheets.
Sifting through the backups is so much fun when you’re trying to find when a particular issue started.
Excel is indeed super powerful. I’ve seen firsthand what they power in multiple Fortune 500 companies, and usually for a lot of critical tasks. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that this company was using it for finances.
My backup is ctrl+z 😎
It’s better than just text files or word I guess
This is why I specified “nearly” the worst. It can absolutely get the job done and has basically every tool you’d need to do the job, but it’s pretty much the worst amongst the “this will do everything you need” options.
My thought process was abacus < pen & paper < text file < spreadsheet < database solutions
But a spreadsheet can function like a database. 🤣
Honestly, that’s fine. This may be a wild take, but they grew and their usage of excel obviously didn’t hold them back, what’s the issue?
Should have used three spreadsheets. Excel tends to run slowly when a spreadsheet has more than a million cells in it.
Excel isn’t a problem unless all of it was done on one sheet and the only function used was sum()
That depends on spending articles, not on sum amount. Maybe their accounting is as simple as: 10bn income, 2bn to steal, 3 for salaries, 1 for medicaments and machinery, rest for advertisements.
You don’t need super-pooper software for that.
Even if their spending is that simple in terms of categories, it’s almost certain their breakdown within each category is definitely quite a bit more complex. Hell, my wife runs her own therapy practice with just herself and she talks about how obnoxious dealing with insurance is for billing all the time.
Yeah, it depends entirely on how many things you’re tracking and how many people need to access it. It’s probably not the right tool here, but sometimes it just is.
Using it to share data can be a nightmare, especially since different departments might look at that data in various ways and want their own formats. I work for a Fortune 500 company that, at least at my level of management, emailing around attached full spreadsheets of daily data rather than have a centralized database. I’ve fought it for years, but it’s what the higher ups want…stupid.
Even better when Microsoft puts out improvements like 365 and OneDrive that break certain functions, then depreciates Excel itself. God I hate the cloud.
Probably should get a dedicated ERP system, mainly to just have official support.
But anybody in finance (like me) knows that everybody from low level accounting assistants, to CBOs use excel daily, even if they have an ERP system. For instance, the one I am using is complete shit with outrageous inexcusable ‘features’ (can’t even describe them because they sound made up). So we all just export data to excel so we can format the reports/data into an actual useful format.
Also in finance, hate excel, use python for everything, all my scripts still end with pd.to_excel() because I’m not the only person on the company.
Interesting, never thought about using python as an excel replacement. Definitely wouldn’t work in my current work setting. But I just started taking a python class and I’ll have to keep this in mind.
