Budget Mistakes Excel

How much Excel can business users really handle and how much lack of spreadsheet knowledge presents a burden to the finance department? Here is some interesting data put together by the Buttonwood Group and CFO Magazine on the situation. The survey found that front line managers typically rejected planning and budgeting software applications and relying on finance to step in and prepare the budget on their behalf, creating a lot of extra work for finance and results in a lot of budget mistakes. Do line of business managers have the Excel skills to build accurate budget numbers to begin with? This survey would suggest not, and claims to place an onus on vendors to being pushing a simple interface for the budgeting process that is “business user friendly.” One could argue that much of this is not a skills issue but rather a cultural issue and needs to be ingrained into the ways line of business managers think about planning and budgeting, some might say it’s simply job security for finance heads.