$16bn health agency managed finances with Excel spreadsheet.
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Only those with no experience in corporate finance will find this surprising.
Excel is a powerful tool. The only ones who ridicule it are idiots who don't understand anything.
Excel is a powerful tool.
You typoed 'popular'?
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And they all suck ass
It's because you're supposed to customize them, not use as-is. We've had a lot of happy customers. Some send us gifts! But for the first year or maybe even couple of years, you probably pay more to your partner for implementation, customizations and advice than to the ERP developer for licensing.
ERPs aren't for every company, different ERPs work best for different companies and different partners themselves have their own specializations. The one I work through (used to work for, but now I have my own company and just contract for them), does small to medium sized production companies. Think 5-200 employees usually. The ERP we work with is meant to cover every imaginable use case - which is why it doesn't have enough depth. We add a bunch of stuff that isn't there OOTB, sometimes remove things in default modules, etc.
But first you NEED an ERP partner to make the most of it. At ours the CEO is also the biggest salesman. He's not afraid to tell you if he doesn't think it's a good fit. A bad partner will still try to sell you and that's going to end up in disappointment for everyone.
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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.
My backup is ctrl+z
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It's because you're supposed to customize them, not use as-is. We've had a lot of happy customers. Some send us gifts! But for the first year or maybe even couple of years, you probably pay more to your partner for implementation, customizations and advice than to the ERP developer for licensing.
ERPs aren't for every company, different ERPs work best for different companies and different partners themselves have their own specializations. The one I work through (used to work for, but now I have my own company and just contract for them), does small to medium sized production companies. Think 5-200 employees usually. The ERP we work with is meant to cover every imaginable use case - which is why it doesn't have enough depth. We add a bunch of stuff that isn't there OOTB, sometimes remove things in default modules, etc.
But first you NEED an ERP partner to make the most of it. At ours the CEO is also the biggest salesman. He's not afraid to tell you if he doesn't think it's a good fit. A bad partner will still try to sell you and that's going to end up in disappointment for everyone.
Setting up an ERP can also be completely botched if the company's representatives don't fully grasp all the functions needed. What I've been going through as a customer of an ERP suite is that the "stars" of the software don't actually understand the other 50% of functions outside their department. That remaining 50% is distributed among 4 other departments, so representation wasn't exactly prioritized. Add in high turnover circa 2021 and the whole thing is logistical nightmare that finally at least has a goal in sight.
The other underlying issue is the existing forms usually lack what we need and have too much fluff. Once our ERP partner modifies it, the ERP developer drops all support for that form. We get zero help when it gets mystery glitches.
So yeah, I can get why some places say fuck it and stick with excel. Half the workforce knows excel well enough to write what they need. Take 10% of them to format and lock down spreadsheets so the other 50% of the workforce can just fill in boxes and pick drop downs. It just works.
All that to say, I both expect more form a Healthcare company but also am not surprised.
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Anybody who used ANY library to process xslx knows MS keeps changing it
About ranges... can you give me the range for whole columns minus 6 first records and 9 last records?Would you like this in excel formula, VBA, or python?
It can be done in all. You're only proving the other poster's point. Excel isn't necessarily the best option for tech literate people but given the tech illiteracy of many offices, it isn't surprising they use excel for stuff like this.
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It's just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP
Excel isn't a problem unless all of it was done on one sheet and the only function used was sum()
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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?
The fact that excel lacks any sort of auditing or access controls. The fact that any corruption in the file could lead to the company not knowing what money goes where and who's been paid and who owes them money.
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Anybody who used ANY library to process xslx knows MS keeps changing it
About ranges... can you give me the range for whole columns minus 6 first records and 9 last records?Anybody who used ANY library to process xslx knows MS keeps changing it
I highly doubt that, also, people in corporate finance do not use libraries to process excel files.
About ranges… can you give me the range for whole columns minus 6 first records and 9 last records?
=OFFSET(first_cell, 7, COLUMNS(range_name), ROWS(range_name)-9-7)whererange_nameis the label given to the whole table andfirst_cellis its first cell. -
The fact that excel lacks any sort of auditing or access controls. The fact that any corruption in the file could lead to the company not knowing what money goes where and who's been paid and who owes them money.
Excel or not, they should be using backups.
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It's just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP
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.
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Only those with no experience in corporate finance will find this surprising.
Excel is a powerful tool. The only ones who ridicule it are idiots who don't understand anything.
Is it powerful? Yes
Is it fast when dealing with large volume of data? No
Are the "powerful" features intuitive to new users? Also no.
Source: I use Excel, Python, SQL for job
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It's just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP
Should have used three spreadsheets. Excel tends to run slowly when a spreadsheet has more than a million cells in it.
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Only those with no experience in corporate finance will find this surprising.
Excel is a powerful tool. The only ones who ridicule it are idiots who don't understand anything.
au contraire. We know the abuse Excel has to go through. And MS even added features to make abusing it easier.
abuse means incorrect use here. incorrect means, there are better tools for the job.
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For a non-joke answer. ERP in this context means Enterprise Resource Planning. It basically allows you to do everything an enterprise requires with one software system instead of using several different ones.
Ta, I was curious.
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Excel or not, they should be using backups.
'Why do we need a backup when we have a RAID?"
The accounting head when you try to explain that your backup systems are woefully insufficient.
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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.
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Anybody who used ANY library to process xslx knows MS keeps changing it
I highly doubt that, also, people in corporate finance do not use libraries to process excel files.
About ranges… can you give me the range for whole columns minus 6 first records and 9 last records?
=OFFSET(first_cell, 7, COLUMNS(range_name), ROWS(range_name)-9-7)whererange_nameis the label given to the whole table andfirst_cellis its first cell.Such a weird argument that you've responding to, as the answer (as you provided) is so easy and well known.
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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?
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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.
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Only those with no experience in corporate finance will find this surprising.
Excel is a powerful tool. The only ones who ridicule it are idiots who don't understand anything.
You can do almost everything with excel. Should you do almost everything with excel? Definitely not.
