Gianluca Bisceglie, founder and CEO of Visyond, offers a smarter way to manage your spreadsheets
Up until the past few years, there was no alternative to Excel. If you wanted to crunch numbers, keep financial records, and manage your corporate finances and risk analysis, this software was the only tool at your disposal.Yet, as many know who use it on a regular basis, it is far from perfect.
Studies show that as many as 90 percent of spreadsheets contain errors. From copy and paste oversights to hidden cells and miscalculations, it is almost worth assuming that you've either encountered or created an Excel blunder at some point in your working life.
You’re in good company, too, because huge multinational corporations are not immune to these problems either. For example, during the global recession of 2008, Barclays accidentally bought 179 Lehman Brothers trading positions when two junior lawyers converted an Excel document into a PDF, revealing a column of positions that should have been deleted. They had only been hidden, then included in court documents because no one knew they weren't meant to be included.
By their very nature, spreadsheets often involve the input of more than one person, so as documents go back and forth, errors and complexities have the potential to multiply. There is no way to trace who made changes with Excel, and this can cause numerous headaches, especially when the information contained is mission-critical. Depending on the type of organisation, mistakes can cost millions. But this doesn’t have to be the case. With the right systems, you can control your most sensitive data, mitigate risk and prevent theft and malicious damage. Visyond is a smart spreadsheet software platform that offers a flexible and familiar interface – which is cross-compatible with Excel. It also adds multiple layers of secure and selective sharing, as well as data tracking and analysis automation that reduce the risk of data leaking and inaccuracies. Plus, being cloud-based, means you never lose information and you can manage and transfer team knowledge quickly and easily (no more spreadsheets being kept on one person’s desktop).
Along with unintentional oversights, fraud and theft also pose serious threats to Excel files because they can be emailed to anyone, making them a high-risk document from a compliance perspective. With regulatory and compliance burdens – including the GDPR which came into force in Europe on 25th May – business owners can no longer risk emails going to the wrong people. You can’t take the chance that a disgruntled employee could potentially sell, steal or destroy data.
As well as the danger of data protection compliance issues, you don’t want to run the risk that errors and untraceable changes could lead to poor financial decisions being made that could put your organisation in jeopardy. If you use Excel spreadsheets for financial projections and records, the worrying truth is that this information could easily end up in the wrong hands. Visyond is asecure, cloud-based spreadsheet management platform which offers collaborative and automated value analysis and decision-making tools that reduce security threats and errors. The software offers a familiar user-experience, while providing features that are a necessity in today's data-driven security-conscious world.
Not only do most traditional spreadsheets leave your data vulnerable and open to abuse, they are also time-consuming when it comes to analysing the data as part of decision making processes. On average, Visyond users report a 70 percent productivity boost. Visyond saves time and money by speeding up routine manual activities from days to minutes, thanks to built-in analysis tools. For example, it enables you to run ‘what-if’ analysis in a few simple clicks, and you can have as many scenarios as you like without the chaos of multiple file versions.
This spreadsheet management platform strikes a balance between the flexibility and familiarity of Excel, and capabilities of modern cloud technology. When it comes to data, you no longer need to put up with sub-standard software.
Gianluca Bisceglie is the founder and CEO of Visyond (https://visyond.com/). Visit the website to find out more about what Visyond can do for you and your business.