9 Reasons Why Spreadsheet-Based Planning Is Risky For Your Business
It’s no secret that spreadsheets are one of the most versatile and user-friendly tools around. They are the tool of choice for many operational and finance teams with a perceived ease of use and suitability for a range of planning, tracking, budgeting, reporting and other tasks. Consequently, many businesses rely on spreadsheets for some of their processes and have many use cases. Everyone can relate to the statement, “we have our applications AND spreadsheets.”
This makes it sound like it is the norm, but it hides the fact that there are many use cases within a business. Many use spreadsheets as a valuable tool to improve personal productivity as well as other practical uses.
78% of respondents were either overwhelmed by too much poorly managed data, constrained by the access to the right data, or hamstrung by a lack of technology to use to generate insight. depend on spreadsheets for collecting data across the majority of their business units.
Source: FSNs Global Panel Survey of Decision Makers on Data Management Practices
Why should you be thinking about Strategic Planning Software?
Executives and decision makers increasingly demand integrated business intelligence that incorporates real time data, rich insights and compelling visualization. Spreadsheets not only fall short on meeting these requirements, but also create significant risks in the business planning process. Here are our 9 top reasons why spreadsheet-based planning is risky for your business.
High Risk Of Errors
Poor Productivity
Poor Process
Inability To Scale
Lack Of Reporting Analytics
Lack Of Engagement Due To Poor User Experience
Spreadsheets are looked on fondly by finance teams, analysts and operational staff who use them regularly, but it’s a different story when it comes to executives and decision makers.
Limited Planning Features
Although spreadsheets support a wide array of calculations and other aids to assist planning, they fall short in key areas.
Lack Of Integration
Spreadsheets simply don’t have the capability to integrate and analyze data across systems without relying on a separate, often deeply technical and bespoke backend application.
Reduced Business Agility To Respond To Changes
“Planning gave us the ability to pull data from multiple databases and we have multiple databases. We have our ERP system, 1Staff Back Office, Webtime, we have our front office system Bullhorn, and we also have other databases which eventually we would like to link to as well and pull information from. Being able to pull information from multiple systems and report that all on one dashboard and put that information together to analyze the information from is really powerful.“
Karen Mann, Chief Financial Officer Ian Martin Limited
Get in Touch
To discuss how 1Staff Planning will empower and evolve your staffing firm with strategic, driver-based budgeting and forecasting.
About 1Staff Staffing Software?
1Staff is the leading staffing software and recruitment solution that fully leverages the Microsoft Dynamics platform.
1Staff Front Office is built on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform and will help your sales people find and service clients, help your recruiters manage candidates and fill jobs quicker and help your compliance team drive efficiencies and de-risk the onboarding process.
1Staff Back Office is built on Microsoft Dynamics GP, a powerful pay/bill and financial (GL/AR/AP) system. 1Staff Back Office will help your workforce capture their time, help finance smooth the pay/bill process and help the executive control and grow the business.
1Staff Analytics & Planning underpinned by Microsoft Power BI delivers extensive analytics, role-based dashboards plus budgeting forecasting and scenario planning
More from 1Staff by Professional Advantage
How to modernize your apps and data on Microsoft Azure
Some organizations still have this misconception that modernizing their legacy applications is too expensive or complicated to roll out and will disrupt their business operations. However, the pandemic taught businesses perhaps one of the most important lessons: ‘modernization breeds innovation’.
Myths and facts about moving to the cloud
Myths and facts about moving to the cloud. What staffing agencies really need to know about moving to Microsoft 365.Is your staffing organization considering Microsoft 365 as its first step in moving applications to hosted solutions, yet you are finding...
The Amazing Search engine behind 1Staff Front Office.
The Amazing Search engine behind 1Staff Front Office allows actionable search across every aspect of the staffing software solution, from marketing, sales, operations, and compliance.
The Professional Advantage Difference
Professional Advantage has been a multi awarded Microsoft Presidents Club Member and Microsoft Certified Partner for many years, providing software solutions underpinned by Microsoft Dynamics GP and D365/CRM platforms.
With 6,000 customers globally, our focus has always been to help our clients use technology to enable high performing workplaces.
