Finance Teams Don’t Hate Spreadsheets. They Hate Babysitting Them.

If you work in finance, chances are you have a love-hate relationship with spreadsheets.

Ask any CFO about their approach to forecasting and they’ll be glad to tell you about scenario models, acquisition analysis and what they’ve done to turn raw numbers into real decisions. That’s where finance brings the most value: figuring out where the business needs to go and finding the most cost-effective way to get there.

Then there’s the hate. It's not spreadsheets per se; it's the wrong spreadsheets. The ones that just hold information nobody ever got around to putting in proper order. The headcount tracker that's always slightly out of date. The contractor sheet someone pulls together manually before every period-end. The absenteeism doc that doesn’t quite match what payroll needs.

These spreadsheets are admin work in disguise – and they're everywhere. Usually because HR and finance don't share a system, so each department relies on their own version to keep things ticking over. The result? Finance spends half their week working on a foundation of data that should already exist.

The numbers behind the problem

Most finance leaders can tell you exactly what their cost-per-hire is, or their revenue-per-head. But what they can't always tell you is how many hours their team spent last quarter just getting their numbers into a usable state. That figure rarely gets measured, but the cost adds up fast.

Finance teams across the UK and Benelux spend more than 50 hours per week on activities tied to financial discrepancies and corrections – most of which can be traced back to manual processes, messy spreadsheets and disconnected systems. That's more than a full working week, every week, just to get their data in order. 

Research also shows 40% of businesses are still managing up to half of their financial data manually. That's a problem everywhere, though especially across EMEA where CFOs currently spend around two-thirds of their working hours on cost reduction. It's hard to cut costs you can't see clearly.

All this feeds into a deeper issue: opportunity cost. Every hour lost to reconciliation and chasing is an hour not spent on the acquisitions conversation, the scenario model or the growth decision that actually matters. 

The most ambitious finance leaders want to grow 20-30% year-on-year without growing the admin burden to match. That only works if the operational plumbing doesn't leak. But right now, for most teams, it does.

The spreadsheets nobody needs in their life

Here's a familiar scenario.

The FP&A team is building its annual plan. They need headcount by department and location, with fully-loaded costs. They ping HR. HR sends an export from the HRIS. Finance opens it, discovers it doesn't match the org chart from last month, finds three people listed in the wrong cost centre and notices two new starters aren't in there yet. 

Only then does it become clear that contractor headcount is tracked in a completely separate sheet owned by someone in procurement. So finance builds its own version – a shadow people database, lovingly maintained in Excel. It's up to date, but only when someone remembers to update it.

Before long, it becomes the spreadsheet nobody asked for but everyone relies on. It's where contractors get manually extracted before every period-end. Where absenteeism data lives in a format that doesn't quite match what payroll needs. Where vehicle allocations across multiple sites get logged, re-logged and, sometimes, lost entirely.

Each one managed separately and each one a potential gap between what finance thinks is happening and what actually is.

Finance teams are fluent in both kinds of spreadsheets: the ones that model something and the ones that just hold information that should live somewhere else. The problem is they're spending the majority of their time on the second kind. And that's on the systems, not the team.

Let’s talk about risk

Managing people data by hand slows things down. But it also creates exposure.

When benefits get approved without finance being notified, payroll runs on incomplete information. When contractor arrangements are reviewed case-by-case with no central record, compliance confidence drops. When expense approvals sit outside payroll in a separate accounts payable process, you end up with additional payment runs that should never have been necessary. 

And when payroll and pension contributions don't reconcile, you're not just looking at an admin headache. You're looking at regulatory scrutiny, potential fines and the kind of correction cycles that consume weeks of senior finance time. It’s enough to keep any finance leader up at night.

Nearly half of departments (46%) express at least some doubt about their data's reliability or timeliness. That uncertainty carries real consequences when the numbers are feeding board reports, investor updates or audit submissions. Nearly a third (31%) said reconciling accounts between entities was their biggest monthly pain point.

Finance usually finds out last – about the new hire, the restructure, the benefits change or the vehicle allocation. They end up delivering bad news about missed compliance rather than helping prevent it. That's what happens when two teams share data but not a system.

Most teams tolerate this until something forces the issue. A board that starts asking questions. An expansion into a new country that exposes gaps in the data. An audit that doesn't go as planned. A new CFO who has no intention of inheriting the mess. That's when the workaround that held things together suddenly isn't good enough.

The finance profession has never been short of risk. Avoidable operational risk shouldn't be added to the pile.

What finance needs from their HRIS

When finance teams evaluate a new HRIS, they're not usually thinking about org charts or performance reviews. They're usually thinking about the line cost and how much we’ll be spending.

The pitch that should land is simple: does this system mean the people function runs leaner, with less coordination overhead, so finance can point to a hard efficiency gain rather than a vague promise of better visibility? Does a role change, a new starter or a benefits update flow automatically into the numbers, rather than arriving via email three weeks later? Does payroll just work, every time, without anyone having to audit it before they can trust the numbers?

For too many teams, getting payroll right and keeping people data current is still eating time that should go towards actual finance work. Fixing it isn't an achievement. In fact, it's overdue.

Every manual handoff between HR and finance is a tax on growth. Every shadow spreadsheet maintained by a senior finance professional is expensive, skilled time spent on the wrong thing. The CFO who grows the business without growing the back-office to match is the one winning.

The best outcome here isn't a new system added to the stack. Finance has seen enough of those. Fewer systems, fewer reconciliations, one reliable source of workforce cost data – that's what they're actually looking for.

Automate the dishes, not the high-value work

Some finance work is creative: scenario modelling, forecasting, acquisition analysis. It's irreplaceable, high-value and where people can make the biggest difference.

Some work is dishes. It’s the reconciliation that has to happen before month-end, or the headcount export that needs cleaning before it's usable. It’s the payroll run that requires cross-referencing three systems because none of them talk to each other. This work only requires human input because nobody has bothered to automate it yet.

A third of finance leaders say eliminating manual processes would have the single biggest positive impact on their work. More than faster reporting or better cash flow visibility. Just: stop making me do the low-value work by hand.

Finance didn't get into this to babysit data. The creative models and strategic decisions are still there to be made – they're just buried under the wrong spreadsheets.