I joined a small manufacturing/assembly business a few months ago. I am still finding errors and unfathomable 'logic' in their management accounts spreadsheets (to say nothing of the countless other spreadsheets - 40,000 at the last count when I searched for .xls files, not kidding!).
To give an idea of the scale of the problems with this one workbook:
• Tabs along the bottom: 37
• Links to external spreadsheets: 18 (around 6 or 7 active)
• Seconds taken to open up spreadsheet: 16 (it’s 4.8MB!)
• Cells in use in spreadsheet: 132,385 (this does NOT include any great listing of stock/debtors/creditors – they are on other spreadsheets).
There was nothing dodgy going on but it would have been easy to have hidden it if there had been. Plenty of immaterial errors from formulae not working etc.
It's literally only in the last couple of weeks I've (largely) made sense of things and created my own workable alternative spreadsheet.
Ultimately professionally written systems need to carry the workload for the type of reporting required. That is what we are working towards. Much fun in the meantime though!
My answers
I joined a small manufacturing/assembly business a few months ago. I am still finding errors and unfathomable 'logic' in their management accounts spreadsheets (to say nothing of the countless other spreadsheets - 40,000 at the last count when I searched for .xls files, not kidding!).
To give an idea of the scale of the problems with this one workbook:
• Tabs along the bottom: 37
• Links to external spreadsheets: 18 (around 6 or 7 active)
• Seconds taken to open up spreadsheet: 16 (it’s 4.8MB!)
• Cells in use in spreadsheet: 132,385 (this does NOT include any great listing of stock/debtors/creditors – they are on other spreadsheets).
There was nothing dodgy going on but it would have been easy to have hidden it if there had been. Plenty of immaterial errors from formulae not working etc.
It's literally only in the last couple of weeks I've (largely) made sense of things and created my own workable alternative spreadsheet.
Ultimately professionally written systems need to carry the workload for the type of reporting required. That is what we are working towards. Much fun in the meantime though!