Top Excel Features to Look for in the Best Planning and Financial Reporting Software Apps
This article is part 3 of an 8-part series on evaluating the best CPM tools for your business. Part 3 focuses on Excel functionalities that strengthen the best planning and financial reporting software applications.
Almost every financial professional both loves and hates Microsoft Excel. It seems like we can’t live with it and we can’t live without it!
So, when you are looking to acquire a new financial reporting or planning solution and you are comparing your vendor finalists, how well each solution interacts with Excel tends to be part of the top user requirements.
It should be noted that while an increasing number of cloud solutions emerged between 2010 and 2015, the popular sentiment from the browser-based vendors was that their tools would completely get rid of Excel. But, in short order, their customers started to miss the formatting and calculation power of Excel (as well as its familiarity) when they were creating reports and budget models. As a result, the early cloud vendors added Excel add-ins to provide an alternative design experience for Excel fans, and several newer vendors such as Vena and Solver made Excel an integral part of their cloud solutions.
For most companies, Excel functionality is THE key to success when using the best planning and financial reporting software.
Here are some of the top features to look for in reporting and budgeting Excel add-ins
Most finance, accounting, and budgeting users would consider strong Excel integration to be one of the top 5 or top 10 features when evaluating and comparing planning and reporting vendors. Below, we will discuss some important features to consider in this regard.
1. The difference between Excel export/import and Excel add-ins
While pretty much every reporting, planning, and corporate performance management (CPM) solution can import data from and export reports to Excel, these processes should not be confused with Excel add-ins, which are plugins to Microsoft Excel that appear on its ribbon.
With an Excel add-in design tool, users build dynamic, parameter-driven reports that pull data from the ERP or CPM database. Data can be refreshed and written back (budgeting and forecasting) without any type of export and import process, which provides self-service for end users.
On this page you can find hundreds of examples of reports and budgeting forms built with an Excel add-in and made to run in a browser. Reviewing vendor examples of the types of templates you want to build with your new solution can be a very good assurance that the design and layout capability in your chosen solution is going to take care of your organization’s needs.
2. Examples of pure Excel tools versus web portals with Excel add-ins
In the past, Excel add-ins were stand-alone reporting tools that needed to be installed on every user’s desktop (or virtual machine). So, if you had 50 users your IT department would be maintaining and upgrading 50 Excel add-ins. Luckily, this has changed. Since cloud architectures emerged in the CPM market, almost all vendors have built multi-tenant web portals that are managed and automatically upgraded by the vendor.
Today, there are still a few of the classic Excel add-ins left and most have the ability to connect to cloud ERPs and “trickle” the data to Excel when reports are processed. All major vendors, however, have web portals where reports are stored and, in some cases, also executed in the user’s browser without requiring Excel to run them. This architecture is particularly useful for planning processes where a significant number of end users can simply open their browsers and enter budgets and forecasts that are stored directly in the CPM solution’s cloud database.
3. The importance of dynamic Excel rows and columns versus static ones
Most organizations add accounts, departments, and other dimension members to their ERP during the year. For older Excel add-ins, this usually requires manual maintenance of reports and budget templates in order to insert new rows or columns, or to maintain the content of dropdowns for parameters (e.g., a list of departments). This is because these add-ins can only put formula references at the cell-level in the spreadsheet.
With modern Excel add-ins, you can have dynamic listing of rows or columns and global report parameters.
Here are some quick examples:
Dynamic rows
If you have, for example, 20 Operating Expense accounts, you can create a range formula on a single row in Excel that automatically expands out to 20 rows. If someone adds 1 new account number in that range, you automatically get 21 rows in the report (or budget form). In older Excel add-ins, you have to manually create each row and, since they are static, new accounts will not become new rows automatically.