Why Farm-Fresh Data Makes for Healthier Spreadsheets

November 21, 2022

Is your spreadsheet eating healthy, or growing out of shape on a junk food diet? This might seem like a weird question, but much like the average person, spreadsheet performance will drop if all it consumes is unhealthy data. Untended manual processes are clogging your reporting arteries with the risk of human error and time-consuming workflows. This means far slower data extraction times and heart problems from inaccurate, outdated information slipping into your reporting.

Invest in the health of your spreadsheets and they will return more value in kind. In this blog, we explore how to get your spreadsheets off the couch and into shape, significantly increasing your output and organizational value.

Is Your Spreadsheet Eating Clean?

When you rely on manual processes, period-end close can take days to weeks. If your data is manually extracted from your ERP and dumped into Excel, numbers could easily be entered incorrectly – and by the end of the process, your information is already outdated.

Like food, information goes stale quickly when it is collected and analyzed in static. One easy way to mitigate the damage of stale data is to implement a solution that allows you to generate fresher reports based on real-time information directly from your ERP and other core systems. This means less meal prep for you, just hit refresh to feed the latest live data to your spreadsheets. Energized by farm-to-table data, your spreadsheet will churn out accurate results that you are confident in every time.

Offload Spreadsheet Meal Preparation

According to the 2022 Finance Team Trends Report by Hanover Research and insightsoftware, over half of finance teams are unable to completely execute on tasks because of time-consuming, manual processes. Why do you burn time preparing the same terrible meals for your spreadsheets every quarter? Automation tools, like Spreadsheet Server, will hook your spreadsheets up to an auto-feeder, full of high-quality, live data. This means simple workflows, refreshable recurring reports populated with real-time data, and reports that distribute automatically to key personnel.

Time spent on data preparation and last-minute reporting adjustments brings your financial close process down to the wire every month. You don’t need to bear that burden. A healthy spreadsheet should automatically do the grunt work for you, freeing up significant work hours for other business-critical analysis.

A Fitness App for Your Reports

ERPs often provide native, out-of-the-box reporting tools that promise the world. However, more complex, custom or ad-hoc reports require IT support or expensive external consultants, neither of whom will understand the need like you do. This leaves little to no time to analyze the numbers, and no way to drill down to the finer details to make the types of critical decisions that drive your business forward.

Implementing a solution like Spreadsheet Server, which leverages the familiar interface of Excel, provides you with refreshable, drillable reports that give you greater visibility over your data. Like a fitness app that allows you to log workout times and nutritional information, Spreadsheet Server highlights your spreadsheets health concerns and allows you to take immediate action.

With Spreadsheet Server, you can sort, group, and use a huge range of criteria in your analysis, making it easier to discover trends and areas that need improvement. This granular perspective on your live information allows you to provide valuable insights to stakeholders and decision-makers within your organization.

Fresher Data for Farmington, NM

Before implementing an automated tool, the city of Farmington, NM dumped data into Excel, then was faced with the arduous task of manually cleaning up data for its approximately 900-page reports. Olena Erickson, the Financial Analyst at the time, was tasked with finding a way to simplify reporting for the city without requiring personnel to learn SQL.

The solution Erickson implemented was Spreadsheet Server, which freed up time to answer critical questions from executives and the organization at large. Knowing information was pulled Spreadsheet Server through a live and direct connection to their ERP, Erickson and her team had a new-found confidence in their reports without needing to meticulously comb through the data for errors caused by manual data manipulation. Previously, accessing the data they needed would require numerous clicks, screens, and exports. Now they are able to start in Excel and stay in Excel, pulling everything they needed into one spreadsheet.

“You can have live financial reporting in Excel in real time,” said Erickson. “My engineers aren’t asking me questions anymore, they can just go and look themselves….Spreadsheet Server was the best thing that ever happened to me. I was able to answer any questions that were thrown at me, which made me look smart and made me feel like a valued employee.”

Spreadsheet Server cleans up your spreadsheets’ data diet by establishing a dynamic connection to your core systems, ERP, and relational information. This translates to automated population of reports and streamlined analysis – all within Excel. With Spreadsheet Server, create dynamic reports you can refresh for down-to-the-minute accuracy, all within a familiar interface.

Request a demo today to learn more.