Challenges with Financial Modeling Tools

Finance professionals grew up building financial models in Excel. It is a tool that people commonly use because MS Excel is easy to use. Moreover, most of the organizations are comfortable to leverage its settings and user-friendly options. However, you may encounter some problems as well. In this article, keySkillset will outline common challenges with financial modeling tools and how to cope with that.

A different version makes a difference

Customers have different Excel versions based on their company requirements. As a result, when they back and forth the Excel spreadsheet, some formats may be eroded. This creates a challenge for collaboration.

A mistake is worth 3 months of work

Excel does not have to be a great tool for collaboration. It becomes more serious when during a company presentation you share the budgeting plan. While talking in front of the leader board, one of them spots a mistake on your budgeted financials. It is a huge problem considering that you relied a lot on great software such as Excel. But humans make errors so does the technology because it was driven by people. Unfortunately, these kinds of mistakes are two to three months’ worth of work.

Technology is difficult to manage when you have multiple collaborators. What happens is that finance teams spend their time creating spreadsheets. Then, they collect, analyze, and review for any errors. After getting all the calculations together, they have to dedicate most of the time on reporting and generating valuable insights. As a result, they don’t really have a lot of time in-hand. What if things could be automated?

Appropriate training requires time

Most of the time companies have an allocated budget for every training. At the end of the day, time is money and the resources need to produce results. Employees are trained a specific amount of time and then it is their problem to continue learning on their own. That means it is either at the cost of their free time or at the cost of the time allocated for a project.

Is there a way out?

Startups and small businesses are trying to cope with the challenges with financial modeling tools. One is sure, we cannot get rid of Excel or use different software because of obvious reasons. However, we can change the way employees learn to manage their time and improve skills. keySkillset offers educational games that help to learn key hard skills 10 times faster. If you do not believe that, try us for free.

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