While fraud due to manipulations in spreadsheets will always be a threat to organizations spreadsheet systems, there are other significant threats that should make you take a decision to get rid of the spreadsheet systems. Spreadsheets are extremely extreme susceptible to even trivial human errors. Missed a function, or insert incorrect functions for calculations, incorrect formulas, data errors, misaligned rows and these all errors will result in incorrect numbers which we may not realize at an early stage of building the report and such errors causes a considerable loss of opportunity amounting to millions and this will damage the management confidence on the numbers and people submitting the numbers.

So how about testing spreadsheets to mitigate the risks of items 1 and 2? Good luck. Spreadsheets just aren't built for that. It's so common have interrelated spreadsheet data scattered across various Users, locations, folders. The most challenging activity which becomes a nightmare that though you are able find out the locations of every related file, tracking the logic of formulas from one related cell to another takes ages. It's very obvious now how you'll also encounter a similar problem when troubleshooting questionable data.

Nowadays organizations observe major changes in business landscape. As business has become very dynamic with mergers and acquisitions, management buyouts, natural calamities and many other factors. And if the organizations technology isn't scalable to adapt to such changes, the business could easily be left behind or face losses. In such case if we're now in an age when major changes are shaping and reshaping the business landscape. Spreadsheets are created by individuals and they become highly personalized user developed self-understood and becomes person dependent system. And when a new person joins in to take over as a part of the massive change, the new person must start from scratch to understand the nitty gritty of the entire spreadsheet solution created by earlier User which itself is time consuming activity.

Financial Consolidation and reporting are all collaborative activities. Which means that the consolidation and its related regulatory reports usually information from different data sources like ERP, CRM, or Accounting Systems and individuals belonging to different departments. In addition, the outcomes a result of multiple exchanges of information from silos of data. Now, if your holding company's subsidiary offices are scattered across the geographical boundaries or if certain team members are separated by large distances, the only way to exchange data stored in spreadsheets is through email. And you will agree that such a method of data exchange is susceptible to duplicate and even erroneous data. Team members will tend to find it hard to keep track of similar files going back and forth, and due to confusion, they even end up sending the wrong version of data.

An auditor cannot trace the user as to who has edited/ modified the data in consolidation with time stamp as this is feature is not available in spreadsheets.

Using spreadsheets as a storage system for storing highly sensitive financial data not a secure solution at all. These spreadsheet files of financial data can easily get corrupted hence risking the loss of the entire data. Spreadsheets as a data storage is always risky from a security standpoint as they reside on an individual computer and exposed to everyone. And where the office generally does not have the rigorous data management and security controls in place to ensure that the sensitive financial data is managed and processed in an optimally secure, consistent and confidential way there Excel is not only an insecure system but also an inefficient storage system.

The access control rights to specific users for specific data in spreadsheet is not possible. Getting quick access to financial information is critical to any organization. Whether it is wanting to see specific account information or a broader view of the portfolio, the entire data will be accessible to even those users who are not required with viewing entire data may lead to risk of errors in critical data by such users having open access to every information on spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets are good for data entry and quick ad hoc data analysis activity and spreadsheets are highly person dependent and data in spreadsheet-based systems are distributed throughout the organization for reference and approvals. When the finance executives generate financial reports from spreadsheets for consolidation/ close they gather data from different spreadsheets, summarize data and submit the same to their department heads through emails, portable storage media or sharing it on shared network folder. The department heads in-turn would check recheck the data and before submitting them to their higher ups. This cycle will continue till the information reaches the decision makers. In this entire consolidation process the data is exposed to many error prone activities such as copy, paste, re-entry in cell, modify links and range specification

Spreadsheet is unmanageable consolidation system for mapping chart of accounts hence time consuming. There is very little facility to view data across different dimensions, periods, currencies, ratios etc. IT support is always required for extraction of data. Spreadsheets doesn't support for multiple line items in an account and doesn't have historical data management for analysis.

This entire process of consolidation in spreadsheet is cumbersome and consumes a huge amount of time and efforts of finance team.

As organization grows, data in spreadsheet-based systems also explodes subsequently making the spreadsheet based consolidation process clumsier as the all the above issues multiply multi fold. Hence it is not advisable for organization to keep using spreadsheets for financial consolidation.