$16bn health agency managed finances with Excel spreadsheet.

Is SAP supposed to be an upgrade?
- SAP is super strict at least, it will just ignore you. Excel will let you fuck everything or help you in doing so.
  
  Lol my company has a "no sort" policy. Many key docs just self destruct if you sort.

Only those with no experience in corporate finance will find this surprising.
Excel is a powerful tool. The only ones who ridicule it are idiots who don't understand anything.
- It’s a powerful tool that you shouldn’t use as a book keeping tool and ledger for a company that manages $16B. And I’ve worked on a trading floor of a big energy company. Excel was only used within departments as a tool for the employees not as the entire companies financial administration.
- Excel is a fantastic tool. It is however not a database.
- Anything Turing-complete is a powerful tool, but the reason people are reacting negatively is because of how much of the wrong tool it is.
  Does an excel-based solution offer adequate runtime performance? No
  Does an excel-based solution offer adequate write concurrency? No
  Does an excel-based solution offer appropriate data durability guarantees? No
  Basically the only saving grace of Excel-based solutions is that they are built in tools that finance workers comprehend, and that is quite simply not enough. To base systems at this scale on Excel is criminally negligent.
- You can do almost everything with excel. Should you do almost everything with excel? Definitely not.
- Is it powerful? Yes
  Is it fast when dealing with large volume of data? No
  Are the "powerful" features intuitive to new users? Also no.
  Source: I use Excel, Python, SQL for job
  
  To be fair I think Excel is faster to get a novice up to speed than teaching them to program
  Source: Manage SQL database infrastructure for a living
- au contraire. We know the abuse Excel has to go through. And MS even added features to make abusing it easier.
  abuse means incorrect use here. incorrect means, there are better tools for the job.
- In fairness to the register they also ridicule moving to a dedicatdd ERP in the same article.
  You're r absolutely right there is nothing wrong with Excel. Its powerful software and ultimately it cones down to human and organisational processes about whether its being used to its best or not. You can also have the most expensive top end dedicated ERP in the world and still be a total mess. Similarly business used to run on pen and paper and could be highly efficient.
  Software is just a tool, and organisation go wrong when they think it alone is the solution to their problems.
  Also I doubt Health NZ overspend has anything whatsoever to do with excel. Instead it'll be due to rising demand, and inflationary pressures on public finances. We have the exact problems here in the UK with the NHS just scaled up to a £182bn.
- Excel is a powerful tool.
  You typoed 'popular'?
- It's not... Try to write a formula range which covers only lower half of the column which is typical setup in summing numbers( avoiding headers ), limits in columns and records, ever changing formats across versions... You asking for a disaster to happen which happens very often
  
  Try to write a formula range which covers only lower half of the column which is typical setup in summing numbers( avoiding headers )
  You can literally label ranges to use them as variables in Excel formulae, not to mention Excel Tables has more operations and features than you'll ever need.
  limits in columns and records
  Unless you are working with an unfiltered, un-aggregated ledger dump straight out of your database (in which case you shouldn't be let anywhere near an office computer), it's rather hard to cross 1M+ rows and 16.4k columns in corporate finance.
  ever changing formats across versions
  The .xlsx format was introduced in 2007 (18 years ago) and hasn't changed since. Not to mention you can still use all kinds of plaintext formats whenever you want.

- I mean, it does its best doing that currently.

It's just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP
How does erotic role play help tame Excel?
- For a non-joke answer. ERP in this context means Enterprise Resource Planning. It basically allows you to do everything an enterprise requires with one software system instead of using several different ones.
  
  And they all suck ass
  
  Ta, I was curious.
- I would also like to know more.
- It let's your accounts blow off steam so they use excel better instead of filling the account ting sheets with dirty messages

Just goes to show that a spreadsheet is a very powerful tool.🤣
- You could run empires on the back of a spreadsheet.
  You absolutely shouldn't, it's nearly the worst option you have available, but you could.
  
  It's not the worst option available, it might not be the cleanest solution, but it does offer a level of flexibility if you have an in-depth understanding of key operational (or financial) business processes.

Honestly, that's fine. This may be a wild take, but they grew and their usage of excel obviously didn't hold them back, what's the issue?
- The fact that excel lacks any sort of auditing or access controls. The fact that any corruption in the file could lead to the company not knowing what money goes where and who's been paid and who owes them money.
  
  Excel or not, they should be using backups.

Excel isn't a problem unless all of it was done on one sheet and the only function used was sum()

Should have used three spreadsheets. Excel tends to run slowly when a spreadsheet has more than a million cells in it.

That depends on spending articles, not on sum amount. Maybe their accounting is as simple as: 10bn income, 2bn to steal, 3 for salaries, 1 for medicaments and machinery, rest for advertisements.
You don't need super-pooper software for that.
- Even if their spending is that simple in terms of categories, it's almost certain their breakdown within each category is definitely quite a bit more complex. Hell, my wife runs her own therapy practice with just herself and she talks about how obnoxious dealing with insurance is for billing all the time.
- Yeah, it depends entirely on how many things you're tracking and how many people need to access it. It's probably not the right tool here, but sometimes it just is.
  
  Using it to share data can be a nightmare, especially since different departments might look at that data in various ways and want their own formats. I work for a Fortune 500 company that, at least at my level of management, emailing around attached full spreadsheets of daily data rather than have a centralized database. I've fought it for years, but it's what the higher ups want...stupid.
  Even better when Microsoft puts out improvements like 365 and OneDrive that break certain functions, then depreciates Excel itself. God I hate the cloud.

Probably should get a dedicated ERP system, mainly to just have official support.
But anybody in finance (like me) knows that everybody from low level accounting assistants, to CBOs use excel daily, even if they have an ERP system. For instance, the one I am using is complete shit with outrageous inexcusable 'features' (can't even describe them because they sound made up). So we all just export data to excel so we can format the reports/data into an actual useful format.
- Also in finance, hate excel, use python for everything, all my scripts still end with pd.to_excel() because I'm not the only person on the company.
  
  Interesting, never thought about using python as an excel replacement. Definitely wouldn't work in my current work setting. But I just started taking a python class and I'll have to keep this in mind.