Excel management reporting - there is a better way

Posted by AccountingWEB PM | on Wed, 12/10/2005 - 14:49 16905 2 comments

More than 30 AccountingWEB members met in London last week for a breakfast briefing on the use of Excel in management reporting.

AccountingWEB technology editor John Stokdyk introduced the session with a broad-ranging overview of the topic before handing over to "pivot table king" David Carter for a practical demonstration of the kinds of summary reporting you can achieve re

Continued...

Have you considered the internal control environment?

John Stokdyk | Fri, 14/10/2005 - 12:57 | Permalink

Stephen,

Thanks for sharing your enthusiasm with Xcelcius with us - it's a very good-looking piece of code that allows you to do all sorts of interesting things with BI data. And you can find out more about it from UK distributor Chase International.

But Xcelcius is primarily a visualisation and presentation tool. If you look at the presentations in this article, and some of our previous coverage on ExcelZone, you might be aware of warnings from the likes of BASDA & PwC about the problems Excel presents under the internal control regime demanded by the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

By all means use Xcelcius to communicate your KPIs and explain the financial numbers, but whether or not you have to comply with SOX, you should think carefully about where the source data is coming from and whether it is accurate and up to date. This remains the big challenge for Excel in management reporting and is something the middleware tools like XRL are attempting to address.

John Stokdyk
Technology editor
AccountingWEB.co.uk

Xcelsius is the future !!!

AnonymousUser | Thu, 13/10/2005 - 15:06 | Permalink

I have been using Excel with pivot tables, Visual Basic etc. for years and yes it is an incredibly flexible piece of software.

Recently I came across a product called Xcelsius (www.xcelsius.com) and I was blown away !!!

It essentially provides a 'Macromedia Flash' front end to Excel and allows you to create interactive models with all the flexibility of excel (formula's etc.) with the visually stunning properties of Flash.

If anyone would like more info, drop me an e-mail (stephen.walker@illuminaltd.co.uk). I'm hoping to use it to provide Exec dashboard's to clients.

I'd be interested to know if anyone else is using it and how they are marketing it with their clients.

Regards,