Users love its flexibility and ease of use — but organizations worry about governance and security
SUMMARY
This article outlines three key reasons why corporate Finance teams in mid-sized organizations continue to use Microsoft Excel for financial reporting.
Reading time: 3 minutes 40 seconds
An indispensable tool for corporate Finance
Despite the growing variety of modern BI and data visualization tools (like Power BI, Tableau, or Looker), Excel remains the primary tool for financial reporting in many mid-sized companies. This may seem paradoxical, but it’s driven by practical, cultural, and structural realities in financial processes. Excel is flexible, familiar, and allows for instant customization. In environments where analytical needs are complex and month-end processes are time-sensitive, teams naturally gravitate toward a tool they already master—one that enables rapid iteration without relying on technical resources.
Reason #1: The complexity of accounting and reporting standards
Financial reporting often requires complex calculations, manual adjustments, and very specific formatting—especially for official statements and performance review dashboards. While modern BI tools excel at data exploration, they fall short when it comes to the precision and formatting required for formal reporting or executive presentations.
To address this, hybrid solutions allow Finance teams to retain Excel as an interface, while centralizing data and business rules behind the scenes—eliminating manual formula errors and versioning issues.
Reason #2: The need for autonomy within Finance teams
Finance professionals often want full autonomy over the creation and updating of their reports. Most BI tools require technical expertise or IT involvement, which slows down responsiveness during a close or forecasting cycle.
To support autonomy without compromising rigor and consistency, some platforms offer Excel-based reporting interfaces where data is dynamic, secure, and connected to a centralized financial model. This allows analysts to enjoy the freedom of Excel with the discipline of a governed system.
Reason #3: The difficulty of extracting and structuring usable data
In mid-sized organizations, financial data is rarely ready for direct use in BI tools. It’s often scattered across ERP modules, lacks standardization, and needs reprocessing or enrichment before it can be reported effectively.
A best practice is to implement an intermediate analytical modeling layer that prepares and structures financial data according to the needs of corporate Finance. A centralized, pre-integrated financial model eliminates the need to rebuild or reprocess data with each reporting cycle.
Conclusion
In short, Excel remains indispensable because it meets specific needs that modern tools have not yet fully addressed: flexibility, precision, speed, and autonomy. However, Excel usage must be structured to avoid risks. SwiftFinance FP&A combines the simplicity of Excel with the power of a centralized analytical model—enabling Finance teams to generate reliable reports without complex formulas or manual imports, while ensuring security, traceability, and data consistency.
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Why Excel is still used for financial reporting?