A finance department in a company is a division responsible for managing and overseeing the company’s resources and operations, including budgeting, accounting, tax compliance, and financial reporting. They play a crucial role in ensuring the financial stability and growth of a company by providing financial insights, making strategic decisions, and maximizing returns on investments. Additionally, they help to ensure the legality and transparency of a company's financial practices. Overall, the finance department is essential for the financial health and stability of the organization.
Finance departments use different software and tools to help manage their tasks. Using these tools, finance departments can automate and streamline their processes, improve data analysis and decision-making, and enhance financial reporting and accountability. One of the most widely used tools is Microsoft Excel.
If we are to talk about why Excel is widely used for financial tools, we can mention about the following advantages of Excel;
Most finance professionals are familiar with using Excel, which makes it an accessible and user-friendly tool. Excel can be easily customized to meet the specific needs of the finance department. It can handle a variety of tasks, such as data analysis, budgeting, and financial models. Also, Excel has a wide range of built-in functions and formulas that can be used to perform complex financial calculations and analysis. It also supports visualizations and pivot tables, which are useful for financial reporting and analysis. It can be easily integrated with other systems and data sources, making it a versatile tool for financial professionals. Finally, compared to other financial tools, Excel is relatively affordable and widely available, which makes it a popular choice for many finance departments.
While Excel has many advantages as a financial tool, it also has some disadvantages, such as Limited collaboration, data limitations, data security, and inflexible reporting. Also, Excel spreadsheets can be prone to errors and inconsistencies, especially when multiple people are working on the same data or when data is imported from other sources. It does not have extensive auditing capabilities, which makes it difficult to track changes and maintain accountability for data accuracy.
Considering all these disadvantages, companies that use Excel for their financial models, eventually look for a solution that will supercharge their financial models. There are many solutions, software and platforms that companies can use. One of them is SpreadsheetWeb.
SpreadsheetWeb is a No-Code platform that allows Excel users to create and publish web-based applications and spreadsheets directly from Microsoft Excel. SpreadsheetWeb provides a platform to publish their Excel models, spreadsheets, and dashboards as interactive web applications, without the need for programming or web development skills.
Let's look at some aspects that SpreadsheetWeb can help businesses to supercharge their financial models with No-Code
Security
With SpreadsheetWeb’s advanced security model, access to financial models can be controlled all the way down to the cell level. SpreadsheetWeb allows users to control who has access to specific data and models, ensuring that only authorized users can access sensitive financial information. Also, SpreadsheetWeb offers an activity-tracking feature that allows specific users to monitor who is accessing their financial models and data and when.
Data Analysis
With SpreadsheetWeb’s built-in database features, users can share and analyze data with others, including stakeholders and clients, in a secure and controlled manner in real-time. Users can create interactive charts and graphs to visualize data and identify trends and patterns. They can aggregate, summarize, and analyze data. Users can also use the data filtering feature to quickly find and analyze specific data contained in the application’s database. Data filters can be applied based on specific criteria, such as dates, values, keywords etc...
Automation & Collaboration
With SpreadsheetWeb, businesses can automate complex financial processes and analysis, such as scenario planning, budgeting, and forecasting. By automating repetitive processes, companies save time and minimize errors. Users can collaborate in real-time with other users on the same data and models, without the need for emailing spreadsheets back and forth. Finally, financial models created with SpreadsheetWeb take only a few minutes to update and deploy for every user. With this, businesses can ensure that everyone is always using the most up-to-date model without getting lost between different spreadsheets.
Excel's combination of familiarity, flexibility, advanced functionality, integration capabilities, and affordability make it a widely used tool for finance professionals. While Excel is a powerful and widely used tool for financial professionals, its limitations and risks must be taken into consideration when deciding whether to use it as the primary financial tool.
SpreadsheetWeb provides a No-Code solution for finance professionals who need to use Excel as their primary financial tool, but also need to share their work with others and collaborate in real time. With SpreadsheetWeb, companies can turn the financial models they have build with Excel into secure web applications in a short time, can enhance their Excel models with interactive features, such as drop-down menus, data validation, and user-defined functions with the advantage of accessing their financial models from any device just with an internet connection.
