$16bn health agency managed finances with Excel spreadsheet.

Comments

• silverhand@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • agelord@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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

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  • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    In fairness to the register they also ridicule moving to a dedicatdd ERP in the same article.

    Youre right there is nothing wrong with Excel. Its powerful software and ultimately it cones down to human and organisational processes about whether its any good or not. You can 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 EB 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.

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  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Excel is a powerful tool.

    You typoed ‘popular’?

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  • endofline@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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

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    • silverhand@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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• Amputret@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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?

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  • Kirp123@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • 4am@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      And they all suck ass

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    • Amputret@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Ta, I was curious.

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  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I would also like to know more.

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  • neatobuilds@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It let’s your accounts blow off steam so they use excel better instead of filling the account ting sheets with dirty messages

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• Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Just goes to show that a spreadsheet is a very powerful tool.🤣

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  • LordPassionFruit@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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• 0x01@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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?

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  • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Lag@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Excel or not, they should be using backups.

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• GreenKnight23@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  even more frighting?

  they aren’t the only one.

  it’s a god damned miracle capitalism hasn’t died in the last 40 years.

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  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I mean, it does its best doing that currently.

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• Lemmist@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • bassomitron@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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  • jonne@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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• randon31415@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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

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• pelya@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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

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• PeteWheeler@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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