SigmaBI

Budgeting in Excel: have you outgrown it?

Virtually every organisation budgets in Excel — including the large ones. A planning software vendor published its own research on it: 87% of companies with other FP&A software still end up in Excel. Excel is not the problem. The question is when the process around it stops growing along.

Five signals you have outgrown it

  1. Consolidation has become manual labour. Copy-pasting forty budget owners' workbooks into one total, every round again.
  2. Nobody knows which version is final. budget_2027_v14_FINAL_2.xlsx decides over millions; who changed what and why cannot be traced — a recurring audit finding.
  3. The forecast is stale the moment it is finished. Actuals come out of the ERP one export at a time; by the time everything stands, the month is over.
  4. One person knows the model. That one controller leaving is a continuity risk that appears on no risk register.
  5. Scenarios take days. Working through price, volume or wage changes means rebuilding formulas, not adjusting a parameter.

Recognise three or more? Then the process has outgrown Excel — not your team.

The mistake most organisations make next

The reflex is to buy a planning suite that replaces Excel. In practice the implementation stalls the moment budget owners lose their familiar environment; the research above shows how that ends: the suite is left unused, the real work returns to Excel — with the licence costs as a lasting souvenir.

The lesson: the winning tool does not replace Excel, it gives Excel a foundation.

The middle route: Excel as the front door, governance underneath

On Microsoft Fabric the input stays Excel-like (planning sheets in Plan in Fabric, Analyze in Excel for analysis), but underneath sits what Excel lacks:

  • Versioning and an audit trail — who, what, when, why
  • Approval workflow — every department's status visible
  • Automatic consolidation — departmental budgets roll up without pasting
  • Actuals next to the forecast — straight from D365 F&O via Fabric link, without exports
  • Write-back — input lands in a governed database, not in a file

For those who already own Finance Premium, D365 Business performance planning is the shorter route; we settle that trade-off up front with numbers. See BPP or Plan in Fabric and the arithmetic in What does Microsoft Fabric cost?.

How to start without a big programme

Not with a six-month suite selection. Like this:

  1. Data & BI Assessment (€ 6,000–9,000, fixed, excluding VAT): the budget process, licence position and data estate mapped.
  2. One cycle as a pilot: one department, one quarter, input in planning sheets, consolidation automatic, actuals alongside.
  3. Scale up per budget round — in time for the 2027 budget process if you start before the summer.

The result is not a new tool that forbids Excel, but a budget process in which Excel again does what it is good at: calculating and analysing — not consolidating, guarding versions and being the truth.