The consolidation
Multiple entities combined by hand, intercompany eliminated from memory, foreign currency applied at a rate somebody looked up. Monthly, under time pressure, at the end of the close.
Services
Somewhere in your finance function there is a spreadsheet with forty tabs, twelve years of accumulated logic, and exactly one person who understands it. It produces a number the board relies on. Nobody has tested it since 2019 and everybody knows this is a problem.
Tell us what it produces and how long it takes each month. We will scope replacing it.
The situation
Different businesses, same pattern: high stakes, high complexity, single owner.
Multiple entities combined by hand, intercompany eliminated from memory, foreign currency applied at a rate somebody looked up. Monthly, under time pressure, at the end of the close.
Contract terms interpreted into a deferral schedule, maintained across amendments, reconciled to billing. The most audited spreadsheet in most companies.
Tiers, splits, clawbacks, and accelerators, computed monthly and disputed regularly because nobody outside finance can verify it.
Rebuilt every month from the same four exports, with the same pivot tables, by somebody whose time is worth considerably more.
Driver-based, several scenarios, updated monthly, and structurally unable to compare what was forecast against what happened.
Overhead pushed to departments or projects by a formula agreed years ago that four people now describe differently.
Excel is excellent. The problem is not the tool — it is that a critical, complex, frequently-run calculation ended up somewhere with no version control, no test suite, no audit trail, no access control, and exactly one person who can maintain it.
Every one of those absences is survivable individually. Together, in a workbook the board relies on, they constitute a genuine business risk that everybody acknowledges and nobody has time to address.
The logic in a mature workbook is rarely documented and frequently not what anybody believes it to be. There are hard-coded adjustments from a prior year, exceptions for a customer who left, formulas that differ in one column of one tab, and at least one number nobody can explain that everyone works around.
Finding those requires reading the workbook cell by cell, and it takes longer than the build. It is also frequently the most valuable part of the engagement, because several of the discoveries are errors.
The replacement is validated by running it against twenty-four months of historical inputs and comparing to what the spreadsheet produced. Every difference is investigated before launch and resolved into one of three categories: the replacement is wrong, the spreadsheet was wrong, or a rule changed and neither is wrong.
All three occur. On a typical engagement several months show differences, and more of them turn out to be spreadsheet errors than replacement errors — which is uncomfortable and is the reason the test exists.
The person who owns the workbook is the domain expert, and replacement projects that treat them as an obstacle fail. They know the exceptions, they know why the odd adjustment is there, and they are the only reliable validator of the result.
What changes is what they spend the time on. Rebuilding the mechanics monthly becomes reviewing exceptions and explaining variances, which is the work they were hired for.
Where to start
Cell by cell, with the owner. Every rule, exception, hard-coded value, and inconsistency documented. Longer than you would expect and the most valuable phase.
Including the ones that turn out to be wrong. Some decisions get escalated here because the spreadsheet was quietly making them on the business’s behalf.
Run against twenty-four months of history, every difference investigated and categorised before anyone signs off.
Both run side by side for two cycles. The spreadsheet is retired when it has agreed twice, not on a target date.
Questions
Tell us what it produces and who maintains it. We will scope replacing it without losing the logic.