How much does Excel financial reporting really cost your company?

The real cost of Excel-based financial reporting for your company, and how to reduce it.

Have you ever wondered how much producing your financial reporting costs your company? If, like two-thirds of CFOs in 2023, you're still using Excel because you think it saves your company money, you're in for a surprise. 

65% of finance directors still use Excel as their reporting tool in 2023, as revealed by the EMASPHERE survey on the "Digitization of financial reporting". Yet this figure is likely to drop over the next two years:

• 72% of them are dissatisfied with it as a forecasting and simulation tool
• 3 in 4 CFOs say they want to invest in financial reporting automation software

And who could blame them? Consider that a CFO working in Excel:

• spends on average 80% of their time manually collecting, centralizing and structuring data to build their financial reporting
• and is therefore exposed to the risk of errors that can lead to poor decisions (garbage in, garbage out).
  
  
  

The cost in time 

Everyone knows the saying: "Time is money." Here again, it couldn't be more true. 

On average, a finance director spends 5 days a month building and maintaining their financial reporting in Excel, where building includes the time spent collecting data, structuring it, checking its reliability and so on. Of course, this average varies depending on how complex your company structure is (for example, the number of entities, or whether analytical dimensions are built into the accounting software, ...).

Taking into account the average annual salary of a finance director (around €130,000/year) plus employer costs, an experienced CFO costs a company an average of €820/day.

Your Excel reporting therefore costs your company an average of 4,100 euros per month. And that doesn't even include the time spent on analysis, which is where a finance director adds real value. After all, it's this analysis that the CFO relies on to make strategic decisions afterward. 

You can run the numbers yourself with this online calculator.  

The cost of errors 

Every finance professional knows it: the many manual steps involved in collecting, processing and calculating data in Excel increase the risk of errors that can lead to inaccurate reporting and, ultimately, to poor decisions. As you can imagine, making strategic decisions based on a report riddled with errors will cost you far more than the savings you thought you were making with Excel.

Take Nathalie Vienne, Controlling Manager at amfori, an EMASPHERE customer. She told us about a mishap from the days when she was still working in Excel: 

"When I took up my role, our 2,400+ members were invoiced one by one, every month. The process wasn't automated, and processing invoices took up to 3 months. Despite a very dense chart of accounts (there was one general ledger account per employee), every report was built in Excel. So I decided to set up an analytical accounting structure, with cost centers and monthly closings. But one day, I submitted a report just before going on vacation… Unfortunately, it contained errors. The cause? Far too many manual steps in Excel and inaccurate monthly closings."

You may have unfortunately experienced this kind of mishap yourself, without knowing that there are reporting automation software solutions that guarantee you avoid 100% of the errors typically encountered with Excel. 

Save up to 67% of your time

Every finance director shares the same goal: to focus on the core tasks of their finance role and to be confident that their data is accurate.

To get there, you need automated, reliable reporting based on data from your software (accounting, CRM, HR, ...). That's why EMASPHERE was created.

Hugues Vandepeutte launched EMASPHERE after several years as a finance director. He faced the problems CFOs typically run into and decided to build software that helps finance directors take control of their reporting. 

The promise is simple: save up to 67% of the time you used to spend in Excel and put it toward the real added value of your role: analysis and strategic decision-making, without having to worry about the accuracy of your data.