How to make Excel more secure and accurate for finance teams

By Rob Howell 

Excel is King. You love it. We love it.  

It is familiar, flexible, and easy to use. I bet your finance team relies on it every day? For reporting, analysis, budgeting, or consolidation. Even in organisations that have invested heavily in financial systems, spreadsheets still play a huge role. 

The problem is that the risks of using Excel are just as obvious as its advantages, especially as a business grows. Spreadsheets are just not designed to manage large volumes of critical financial data. Links can fail, formulas can be overwritten, and different versions of the same file can circulate without anyone being completely sure which one is correct. 

Despite this, users rarely want to move away from Excel, retraining and forcing people to change tools often creates more problems than it solves. This leaves many finance teams stuck. Excel is not secure enough for enterprise reporting, but it feels impossible to replace. 

So how can you make Excel more accurate and secure without forcing people to stop using it? 

The problem is not Excel 

Excel works well as a reporting and analysis tool. The real problems begin when spreadsheets become the place where important data is stored, calculated, and shared across the organisation. 

Once this happens, it becomes difficult to control how numbers are changed, who has access to them, or whether everyone is working from the same version. Small manual adjustments can go unnoticed, formulas can be copied incorrectly, and audit trails can be lost. 

Many organisations invest in consolidation, planning, and reporting systems to avoid exactly these risks. But when the data is exported into Excel for further work, the same problems can return.  

Some organisations try to solve the problem by removing Excel completely. 

In practice, this rarely succeeds. Finance users need flexibility, speed, and the ability to explore numbers in their own way. When a system removes that freedom, people often go back to spreadsheets anyway, even if they are not supposed to. 

This is why so many reporting processes end up with a mixture of systems and spreadsheets, with data moving back and forward between them. And you still aren’t confident in the final numbers. 

You can still use Excel, but differently 

The most effective way to reduce spreadsheet risk is to change where the data lives. 

Modern planning and reporting platforms allow organisations to keep the Excel interface while storing the data in a secure, controlled model. Spreadsheets don’t hold the numbers, they simply retrieve and display them. When the data is managed in a central system calculations are consistent, security rules are applied, and everyone is working from the same version of the truth.  

This approach allows finance teams to keep the flexibility they are used to, while removing many of the risks that come from heavy reliance on Excel 

Keep Excel, Add Planning Analytics 

IBM Planning Analytics provides a secure, high-performance data model where financial data is stored and calculated, while users can continue working in Excel through the Planning Analytics for Excel interface. But behind the scenes, the data is controlled, consistent, and auditable. Everyone is happy.  

Most organisations should not be depending on spreadsheets to manage critical data. By keeping Excel for analysis and moving the data into a structured planning and reporting system, it becomes possible to improve security and accuracy without disrupting the way your finance teams work. 

If spreadsheets are starting to feel difficult to manage, why not speak to a specialist. We are always happy to talk financial reporting and offer advice.  

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