Article

What’s wrong with Excel?

Every company—big or small—has to process data. And plenty of it.

And, as most living, breathing and somewhat digitally adept human beings, you might think Excel will do the job.

And sure, Excel works. Right? It offers all the functions you probably need – and most likely many more you will never truly master. What could possibly go wrong?

In 2024, Health New Zealand (HNZ), a publicly funded healthcare system, lost control of its finances. Budgets were exceeded left and right. By June, the deficit had ballooned into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Deloitte was called in to investigate. Its March 2025 report, covered by the New Zealand Herland, pointed to several structural issues: vague financial plans and ineffective cost-cutting.

But one finding clearly stood out: the $28 billion expenditure organization used a single spreadsheet to manage its financial performance. It contained hard-coded values with no clear links to sources and plenty of room for human error. Deloitte concluded that reliance on spreadsheets and manual processes ‘led to multiple versions of the truth, errors, and a lack of clear visibility of required actions.’

Sometimes, even smaller spreadsheet mishaps carry a heavy price tag.

In 2021 a cryptocurrency trading platform accidentally transferred more than $10 million into an unsuspecting woman’s bank account. According to The Guardian, the error stemmed from a mistyped account number in – yes – an Excel file. It took the company months and a lengthy court case to recover the funds.

In 2022, Iceland’s National Audit Office found that the government had undersold a 22.5% stake in a bank. One of the causes? Spreadsheet errors: commas entered instead of dots, and numbers defined as text rather than figures. The mistakes skewed demand calculations during the share sale, costing the government millions.

Regulators aren’t fond of spreadsheets either. In December 2021, the UK’s Metro Bank was fined £5.3 million. One reason: its reliance on manual spreadsheets for critical financial risk metrics. Data was collected inconsistently, calculations were prone to error, and only a handful of employees understood the spreadsheets.

We don’t want to sound like your primary school teacher, but here it is: mind your spreadsheets. Better yet, stop relying on them for processes that demand accuracy, scalability, and compliance.

Need help making the shift? Let’s talk.