Thinc insights
Microsoft Excel has shaped how we work in the 21st century, but where are its limitations and how can businesses navigate them?
Love it or loathe it, Excel is everywhere.
For finance managers, it’s often the first tool opened in the morning and the last one closed at night – the true comfort zone for a finance professional. Whether it’s forecasts, budget planning, reports, reconciliations or scenario modelling – chances are there’s a spreadsheet involved somewhere along the way.
At Thinc, we see Microsoft Excel used by almost every business we speak to. Excel has earned its place as one of the most trusted tools in finance. But as businesses grow, that trusted friend can quietly turn into a bottleneck – or even a risk to growth plans and trajectories.
So is Excel your ally, or is it slowing you down?
Excel has been around for decades, and there’s a good reason it’s stood the test of time. It’s fast, flexible and familiar – and most finance professionals have grown up using it, whether that’s building simple cashflow forecasts or complex multi-tab models with pivot tables and macros. It doesn’t matter if you’re an Excel king or queen, or someone who sticks to the basic formulas – almost everyone can do something in Excel, and that comfort factor is powerful.
As Gary McKnight, Thinc’s Head of Commercial, says on this matter:
“One of my favourite questions when talking to customers and prospects alike is, I bet you’ve got a spreadsheet. What do you use them for? And everybody gives you the wry smile, as if to say, don’t ask that question, because we’ve got hundreds of them for various things.”
There’s no question about it; Excel is particularly brilliant for:
It is an incredibly powerful reporting and analysis tool, and for many teams, it really does feel like home. But that said, it does have some limitations.
The issue isn’t Excel itself – it’s what happens when spreadsheets are asked to do more than they were designed for. High-profile spreadsheet errors regularly make the headlines, from reporting mistakes to miscalculations with serious financial consequences. Harvard Business School research has previously suggested that around 90% of more complex spreadsheets contain errors, and when examined more closely, roughly half of those errors come from faulty formulas.
That’s rarely because someone didn’t know what they were doing. More often, it’s because spreadsheets evolve in complexity. A model is built, tested and works well. Then it’s adapted. New tabs are added. Extra formulas creep in. Someone else inherits it. Over time, complexity increases – and risk for human error increases with it.
Even newer features don’t eliminate the problem. Tools like Microsoft Copilot do promise to make Excel smarter, but they still rely on the quality and structure of the underlying data in the document. Automation layered on top of flawed processes still carries that same risk.
As businesses scale, spreadsheets often find themselves at the heart of bigger, more complex processes – and that’s where problems start. Many finance teams still export data from other systems, manually import it into Excel, then spend time cleaning it up; removing stray symbols, fixing formats, checking totals and rechecking formulas within Excel – but this all takes time, and every manual step introduces the possibility of error.
There’s also the issue of duplication. Data gets entered in multiple places, and before you know it, numbers don’t quite match. Different versions of the one ‘single source of truth’ circulate across the business. Finance teams spend more time reconciling spreadsheets than analysing results.
All of this impacts:
As Anastasia Gwynne, Thinc’s Head of SAP, puts it:
“Excel is like Marmite – you either love it or hate it. It’s undeniably powerful, but the real problem emerges when it becomes the backbone of day-to-day operations rather than a tool that sits alongside robust systems.”
And that’s where the issues lie.
For business experiencing growth, modern business systems are designed to handle what spreadsheets struggle with. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for core finance, reporting, stock management and operations can automate data capture and processing, provide the single source of truth in a real-time environment; all while reducing manual intervention and scaling as transaction volumes increase.
For us, the core solutions that we recommend that provide these capabilities are Sage 200, Sage Intacct and SAP Business One. Instead of relying on spreadsheets for transactional processing, many businesses now use such solutions to manage the core data across the business – they’ll then connect Excel for analysis and reporting where it adds the most value.
Despite some of its flaws when it comes to business growth, Excel isn’t going anywhere – and it doesn’t need to.
Gary’s advice in our interview with him is simple: don’t manually do it. Use integration tools to link your business and finance systems directly to Excel, so that data flows automatically. That way, you reduce risk while still benefiting from the flexibility and familiarity that Excel offers. Used this way, Excel becomes a safe and effective analysis layer rather than a fragile processing engine.
There’s also a practical cost-saving angle. Not everyone who wants to analyse data needs a full finance system licence. If someone only needs access to reports and analysis, an Excel licence can be a far more cost-effective option.
At Thinc, we don’t start with software – we start with understanding your business, your teams and their pain points, and your blockers to growth. Our consultative approach focuses on diagnosing what your business actually needs, both now and as you grow. We look at how you’re currently using tools like Excel, where the risks are, and where inefficiencies are creeping in. From there, we work with our trusted partners to deliver bespoke modules, integrations and reporting solutions that fit your processes – rather than forcing your business to fit a particular software.
And with that considered – Excel still has a role to play. The key is knowing where it adds value, and where it’s time to let more robust systems take over. If you’re relying on spreadsheets more than you’d like – or you’re not sure whether Excel is helping or hindering your growth – that’s exactly the conversation we’re here to have with you.
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