Early in a product demo this year, an FP&A lead stopped us with a warning: "You've got to beat Excel. We love Excel. Excel was the best man at my wedding." Controllers on NetSuite, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks, and Business Central told us the same thing.
They're right. Excel isn't what slows down the month-end close. Getting data into Excel is. Fortunately, add-ins for Excel can plug this gap.
Where close time actually goes
Ask an accountant how a balance sheet reconciliation starts and you'll hear some version of this:
- Export the trial balance from the ERP.
- Open the GL detail for the account and period.
- Download it to CSV.
- Paste it into last month's workpaper and fix the columns.
- Repeat steps 1-4 for another source of data, such as the bank feed, credit card statement, payroll report, or payment processor.
- Tie out, and rerun if a late entry posts.
None of these steps is hard; together they eat days of every close. If you've ever exported a NetSuite trial balance by hand, you know how many clicks sit behind step one alone.
- A CFO running a multi-entity Sage Intacct instance said tracing one budget variance takes "500 clicks" through the ERP.
- A revenue accountant reconciles two payment processors against the billing system each month. Each report runs about 1,500 rows, and finding the missing payments takes a full day per processor, so two days of every close.
When those totals don't tie, the work turns into a hunt for amounts that add up to the difference. Another team re-pastes fresh GL data into its workpapers whenever anything changes, because the standard ERP reports make it hard to see when an entry was recorded rather than the date it applies to. Accrual reviews have their own version: checking the AP system one vendor at a time to see what has been billed, approved, or posted.
Every one of those steps is a chance to paste the wrong range, work from a stale export, or miss a late entry.
Ditching Excel entirely doesn't work
The usual answer from the software vendors you speak to is to pull the work out of Excel and into a web app. That may work for the specific use cases of the software tool, but it doesn't have the flexibility of Excel.
Your workpapers carry years of formulas, layouts, and review habits. Your auditors expect an Excel file. Your team knows where every subtotal lives.
Excel itself isn't the problem; it's that it's often disconnected from other sources of information, and bringing this information into Excel can be a source of errors.
What is an add-in for Excel?
An add-in runs in a pane beside your workbook. It is connected to the Internet and can load information from external systems. It can read your spreadsheet and know which cell(s) you have selected on your cursor.
For accounting teams, an add-in for Excel should be connected to your ERP, your close checklist, the other files in your Drive, and any other systems you freuqently pull data from. With these connections, it can:
- Show the trial balance, the reconciliation status, and the underlying transactions for any account
- Load GL detail for any account and period into any cell or a new sheet, with each row linking back to the ERP
- Save the filters you run every month (memo, vendor, department, periods, entities, etc) and refresh them without closing the file
- Match two sources, such as a bank statement and the GL, by fields and tolerances that you configure, and tell you what's still unmatched
- Let preparers and reviewers sign off and leave review notes from the workbook
- Load variance reports by department, account, or vendor that still let you click a number to see the transactions behind it or generate a vairance analysis
Three workflows that change
- Transaction matching. The revenue accountant above already keeps both payment reports in one reconciliation workbook. With transaction matching in the add-in, you point it at the two ranges, match on amount, and allow a one- or two-day difference in dates. Matched rows are flagged, and the short list of exceptions is where the two days of searching used to go. This is how many reconciliation automation software tools, such as NetSuite Account Reconciliation, match transactions.
- Accrual reviews by vendor. One team with hundreds of vendors accrues for freight, packaging, and other bills that arrive late. Their accrual workbook has a column of vendor names. Selecting a vendor's cell pulls that vendor's invoices from the AP system, filtered by status: posted, approved, or still waiting on approval. Nobody has to search the AP system one vendor at a time.
- Board reporting. An FP&A lead described a request they get constantly: the CFO wants next quarter's actuals against budget, formatted for the board. With a report that loads into the workbook in two clicks, you get department, account, and vendor lines with drill-down intact. An accounting firm we work with pulls nine months of activity grouped by account and vendor in one query. Before, that meant dozens of separate drill-downs in NetSuite.
How CloseCore's add-in for Excel works
CloseCore's add-in for Excel does each of the jobs above inside Excel for desktop and Excel on the web. It lets you keep your existing Excel workpapers, while giving you immense power to pull exactly the data you need without leaving Excel. It also runs automated transaction matching on ranges in your workbook.
Pick the workpaper your team rebuilds every month and follow the add-in setup guide to install it and connect that file before your next close.
