Still relying on Excel for reconciliation, consolidation, or reporting? Spreadsheets may seem efficient, but hidden costs are stacking up. Take our quick self-assessment to uncover your team’s spreadsheet reliance, and learn where automation could save you time, reduce risk, and scale operations.
Spreadsheets have long been the financial world’s go-to tool. They’re flexible, familiar, and often feel indispensable. But that dependence is starting to show cracks.
In many finance teams, these tools fill critical gaps left by ERPs: often without structure, governance, or visibility.
Whether it’s mapping accounts, reconciling intercompany transactions, or tracking audit adjustments, Excel remains a default system of record. But as companies scale, those files become fragile. Version control breaks down. Reporting slows. And teams end up spending more time managing spreadsheets than managing outcomes.
Manual processes are more than inefficient. They’re expensive. A PwC study found that finance teams spend nearly one-third of their time on reconciliation tasks alone. Even in high-performing companies, analysts report spending 40% of their time collecting data instead of interpreting it. This leaves little room for strategic insights and keeps teams focused on reacting rather than planning ahead.
So how reliant is your team on this kind of workflow? Use the quiz below to evaluate your current state and see where AI-powered tools could offer faster, more scalable solutions.
The Hidden Costs of Spreadsheet Reliance
Spreadsheets can feel deceptively efficient. But beneath the surface, they introduce a range of operational and strategic challenges that erode finance team performance over time.
Manual workflows built in Excel often take hours that could be spent on analysis and decision-making.
Tasks like reconciling transactions, compiling financial statements, or managing intercompany eliminations become repetitive and time-consuming, especially when performed across dozens of siloed files. With every new month, the process restarts, leading to operational fatigue and missed deadlines.
Then there’s the risk factor. Excel files are prone to human error. Broken formulas, version control issues, and miskeyed data can all have real financial consequences. One misplaced decimal or incorrect cell reference can lead to inaccurate reporting, audit issues, or poor decision-making.
As companies scale, spreadsheet-based systems fail to scale with them. What works for a five-entity group quickly collapses under the weight of twenty. These tools weren’t built for real-time collaboration, traceability, or integrated automation.
They limit visibility, fragment processes, and create a reliance on tribal knowledge where only one or two team members truly understand the structure behind the file.
Ultimately, while spreadsheets have long been the default, they are now the single biggest bottleneck preventing finance teams from modernizing. The more they’re used for tasks that could be automated, the more they slow down growth and add risk to the business.
You might also like: How AI Agents Replace Spreadsheets in Modern Accounting
Take the Excel Dependency Quiz
Take this quick self-assessment to better understand how much your team relies on spreadsheets. It takes less than two minutes and will give you instant clarity on your automation opportunities.
What Your Score Means
Every finance team is on a different part of the modernization journey. Your score reflects your current level of reliance on spreadsheets and how far along you are in shifting toward automated, scalable processes.
You’ve Moved Beyond Excel (Score: 0–8)
Your team is already operating with a forward-thinking finance stack. You’ve replaced many manual spreadsheet tasks with modern tools that prioritize accuracy, visibility, and automation.
By embracing AI-powered agents and structured workflows, you’ve made room for what matters most: real-time insight, confident forecasting, and strategic analysis. Continue refining what’s working and keep identifying new opportunities to evolve your processes.
You’re on the Right Track (Score: 9–20)
You’ve begun the move away from spreadsheet dependency. Some workflows may be partially automated, but others still lean heavily on Excel for data entry, tracking, or reconciliation.
The good news is that your foundation is already improving. With a few strategic changes — like automating recurring journal entries or centralizing your close checklist — you could accelerate your team’s efficiency and reduce exposure to human error.
You’re Probably Over-Relying on Excel (Score: 21–36)
Your results suggest that your team still handles a significant portion of its core financial operations manually. From reconciliations and close checklists to consolidations and reporting, these tasks are likely rooted in Excel.
While this may work in the short term, it creates a heavy operational burden. You're likely dealing with version control issues, inconsistent data, and time lost to repetitive manual work.
As your business grows, these gaps become more costly and risky. Now is the time to shift from reactive processes to automated, integrated workflows.
Recommended read: Modern Accounting Tools: Excel vs RPA vs AI Agents Compared
Excel Alternatives with AI-Powered Solutions
Modern finance teams don’t need to rip out their existing systems to move beyond spreadsheets. Nominal’s agent-based architecture integrates with your current tools and workflows, enhancing them with intelligent automation.
These agents are trained to handle real accounting logic, not just generic task automation. That means they understand the structure of financial processes and operate with audit-level precision.
Here’s how different types of AI agents from Nominal can replace spreadsheet-reliant workflows:
- Reconciliation Agents: Instead of building endless tabs to manually match transactions, these agents automatically reconcile entries across systems and flag exceptions in real time. They reduce the time spent on high-volume matching by up to 80%.
- Close Management Agents: These agents coordinate your entire month-end process — assigning tasks, tracking completeness, automating recurring journal entries, and surfacing bottlenecks. They act like an always-on close checklist with built-in visibility.
- Consolidation Agents: Ideal for multi-entity environments, they detect and eliminate intercompany transactions, consolidate ledgers, and generate necessary entries; all without a spreadsheet in sight. They work across systems and entities with full traceability.
- Variance Analysis Agents: Instead of exporting reports to Excel and manually building flux analyses, these agents automatically identify unusual variances, explain the likely causes using context from your systems, and generate executive-ready summaries.
Each of these agents transforms what used to be a manual, spreadsheet-heavy task into a streamlined, scalable workflow, freeing your team to focus on insight, not input.
If your quiz results show that your team is stuck in spreadsheets, you're not alone. But you don't have to stay there. Book a demo with one of our experts to see how Nominal can help you automate your finance processes and reclaim valuable time.
