Escaping Excel Hell - Summary of Recent Articles

The articles on "Escaping Excel Hell" have recently covered the following topics:

1. Useful Add-Ins (including gauges pictured)
   
2. Processes Desperately Seeking Automation
3. Reporting
4. Forecasting and Budgeting

I hope you find the articles interesting and useful. By helping you cut cut costs and boost revenues, I hope you also find them above all profitable!

Escaping Excel Hell – Forecasting and Budgeting

Budgeting and forecasting in the mid-market is an oddity. Corporate systems exist, such as Cognos Planning (formerly Adaytum), but these are often too expensive for mid-sized organisations.

At the lower end there is the likes of Sage Forecasting. But in the mid-market?

Microsoft bought ProClarity, which was transformed into PerformancePoint. Moments later it was morphed into SharePoint, but the budgeting was dropped: As announced by a firm who had built their business on it: “The major shakeup of PerformancePoint announced on 23rd January 2009, sees the Monitoring and Analytics arm of the product being re-branded ‘PerformancePoint Services’, while the Planning element is being discontinued. PerformancePoint Services will become a feature of the much larger Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. This has taken the Microsoft BI market completely by surprise and has affected both suppliers and customers alike.” Thanks Microsoft!

That brings us back to that good old workhorse, Excel (also from Microsoft). But we’ve looked previously at the significant drawbacks of using Excel for budgeting, especially when multi-user collaboration is needed.

Surely the cloud can bring us something powerful yet affordable? Yes, but little as yet. Leading the marketing battle is Adaptive Planning . To follow....
(see the subsequent article)