Database vs Excel – Is there a middle ground?
There is no doubt that there are “two camps”, IBM, SAP and Oracle on the one hand, and Rugged Logic and Sage on the other. However, I am really not sure whether there is a “middle ground”.
In reality the difference between a corporate database solution such as Adaptive Planning and an Excel based software solution such as Rugged Logic is all about interactivity. Whereas enterprise solutions clearly score when it comes to handling large amounts of data across many countries and departments, they can’t supply the level of interactivity that accountants refer to as “modelling their business”.
Even the largest corporations (who will certainly have at least one corporate database solution) still revert to Excel for interactive decision-making… for flexing assumptions and “business drivers” in order to get a feel for how their business results will be impacted by possible decisions they may make. Only when you have an entire model of the business there at your fingertips can this level of judgement be captured – a process which Rugged Logic calls the “perceptive process”. Whilst in theory, it should be possible to do this in a pure software solution, the ease and comfort with which it can be done in Excel has never been matched.
So rather than there being a gap between the “two camps”, I think a better way to describe it is that there is a threshold of corporate size and complexity above which it becomes necessary to have a corporate database solution (in addition to Excel).
All of which leaves the accountancy community with a challenge to (a) at the lower end, make sure their Excel systems are as rugged and reliable as possible and (b) at the higher end, make sure that the corporate planning software industry stays alert to its need for good interfaces with the top-level Excel models which will inevitably remain on the CFO’s laptop
