The lure of the spreadsheet is easy to understand: it is simple enough for beginners, yet powerful enough for experts. For over 3 decades, spreadsheets have been the tool of choice for financial professionals, yet they are widely derided as error prone and lacking the controls required by large organizations. This eBook outlines the role of spreadsheets within enterprise-level organizations and how Axiom EPM has embraced Excel in a unique and innovative way.

1. SPREADSHEETS AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
A publication from:

2. www.axiomepm.com
SPREADSHEETS AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT / 2
The modern business planning landscape
INTRODUCTION
Excel for the enterprise
Axiom EPM offers the Excel integration and robust performance
management functionality that larger organizations demand. The
unified platform extends the capabilities of Excel—leveraging
familiar Excel business modeling, not complicated script logic—to
support both finance professionals and business users. Designed
to capitalize on existing investments in and knowledge of Excel,
Axiom EPM transforms spreadsheets into a highly scalable
enterprise-grade application suite.
www.axiomepm.com
The ubiquity of spreadsheets
The spreadsheet dominates the modern business planning landscape.
Throughout all levels of an organization, those responsible for any
aspect of planning interact with spreadsheets, and the average
finance professional spends at least 25% of their time maintaining
them. Their appeal is understandable: they provide an environment
that every finance professional understands and the
familiarity, syntax and flexible modeling that are simply not possible
with packaged applications. These reasons help explain why
spreadsheets have remained the de facto choice of finance for
planning, modeling and reporting since the days of VisiCalc and Lotus
1-2-3.

3. www.axiomepm.com
SPREADSHEETS AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT / 3
Excel and performance management
While the spreadsheet is an excellent tool for small tactical
projects, even the most sophisticated Excel users struggle to
use them to perform robust planning and management
reporting. In this eBook we’ll discuss why organizations
struggle with standalone spreadsheets, the benefits of an
integrated enterprise performance management
solution, how the use of spreadsheets can be more expensive
in the long run.
Rethinking spreadsheets and performance management
The best of both worlds
We will also describe why Axiom EPM is the natural choice
for finance teams that want to leverage their existing
Excel skills either on-premise or in the cloud, while
providing unmatched modeling flexibility, enterprise
controls and optimized reporting for better organizational
decision making.
www.axiomepm.com

4. www.axiomepm.com
SPREADSHEETS AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT / 4
Why companies struggle with Excel standalone
Axiom EPM Performance Management Survey, September 2013
The benefits of Excel are not under dispute. Their simplicity belies a complex tool powerful enough to support high-
level applications and modeling. What is in question is whether they are the best tool to support an organization’s
business objectives.
Many industry experts deride the use of spreadsheets as part of a closed-loop performance management process
because they tend to be error-prone, they lack the level of control required by larger institutions and waste valuable
resources on mundane activities.
www.axiomepm.com
WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES ASSOCIATED WITH USING EXCEL?

5. www.axiomepm.com
SPREADSHEETS AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT / 5
Indeed, when spreadsheets are pushed beyond the boundaries of their intended use and utilized as a
planning tool across a larger enterprise their numerous shortcomings and challenges come to light, some
of which include:
Some of Excel’s shortfalls
They’re labor intensive: Uploading, downloading, emailing, reconciling and consolidating
are a few of the manual tasks associated with spreadsheets in the context of budgeting.
The lack of real time data aggregation with no easy ability to create scenarios means that
finance has to initiate a tedious round of data collection and fixing broken links each time
management wants to see the results of an updated assumption or an alternate version.
They lack data integrity: The manual nature of stand-alone spreadsheets opens the
organization to data integrity issues. When every user who accesses a spreadsheet
represents a potential risk to the integrity of the data it contains, the numbers cannot be
trusted and the entire process becomes handicapped and called into question.
They’re unable to model the enterprise: While spreadsheets can support robust
modeling, they’re weak from an enterprise perspective. The ability to create a large-scale
model across multiple product categories, product lines, business units etc., inclusive of
operational drivers, is virtually impossible. Organizations using spreadsheets tend to turn
budgeting into a data collection exercise vs. an enterprise modeling exercise – which
greatly reduces the value.
www.axiomepm.com

6. www.axiomepm.com
SPREADSHEETS AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT / 6
Excel Chaos
www.axiomepm.com
#NUM!
#DIV/0!
#VALUE!
#NAME?
#REF!
#N/A
Version control and supplementing with Excel
These shortcomings along with numerous others result in what many call Excel Chaos, a term that
conjures a burgeoning number of rogue spreadsheets with dubious or untraceable data and no
audit trail. Yet despite the pervasiveness of this dissatisfaction, finance organizations do not want to
give up their beloved Excel spreadsheets. Even among those who choose to implement a purpose-
built budgeting system, an overwhelming 87% continue to use spreadsheets to augment the system
and conduct off-line modeling.

7. www.axiomepm.com
SPREADSHEETS AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT / 7
Thomas Otter, Research Vice President at Gartner, explains this Excel preference:
To be sure, rarely do business users rave about great experiences with enterprise software. Within the
performance management domain—budgeting, forecasting, consolidations, profitability, analytics, and
reporting—users tend to get in and out of these applications as quickly as possible, often with Excel models
on the side. Otter advises software vendors to ask themselves some hard questions about their design
thinking.
At Axiom EPM, our design thinking from the beginning has been focused on the office of finance’s
preference for Excel.
EPM software and design thinking
Excel hell … is the fault
of enterprise software
failing to provide an
alternative.

8. www.axiomepm.com
SPREADSHEETS AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT / 8
In addition to performing the most critical task of producing and reporting upon useful, collaborative and accurate
data, a unified performance management solution should also complement and enhance Excel’s capabilities to satisfy
the organization’s need for complete flexibility and control. Benefits of an integrated performance management
platform include scalability, data storage and access, multi-dimensional reporting, security, and process management.
The benefits of an integrated EPM solution
Scalability: The use of standalone spreadsheets is manageable in low user count environments, but
completely out of the question in medium to large user populations. The goal in serving large user
populations should be the delivery of robust business models that are unique to the individual without
requiring manual intervention from the system administrator. Well-designed performance management
software allows organizations to design budget templates and calculation methods that align with
different business segments. And at the touch of a button, data is populated and formatted into unique
planning workbooks with no manual intervention required.
Data Storage and Access: The organization’s performance management data sources must be clearly
defined, easily accessible and trustworthy. Formerly disparate operational and financial data sources—
budgets, models, reports—are managed and stored in a single platform with common structure and
definition to be used in a consistent manner across the organization. This results in accurate and trusted
data that can be used confidently in decision making.
Security: Standalone spreadsheets are nearly impossible to manage from a security perspective.
Passwords can be applied to spreadsheets, but the design was never intended for a broad audience with
various rights and authorization levels. Data should be stored in a secure repository that can then be
accessed and manipulated via a simple web interface.
www.axiomepm.com

9. www.axiomepm.com
SPREADSHEETS AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT / 9
The benefits of an integrated EPM solution, continued
Performance management software solutions should embrace and maintain the financial modeling capabilities and
ease of use that financial professionals know and appreciate, while ensuring the data integrity, security, workflow
and enterprise performance that the organization requires. The result is actionable information that the
organization can trust and understand to enable better decision making.
Multi-Dimensional Reporting: Organizations must aggregate and present data across their multi-
dimensional landscape. Using a consolidated performance management platform rather than standalone
spreadsheets eliminates the need to use formulas to consolidate data across linked stand alone files.
Successful performance management enables real-time and ad hoc access to insightful and actionable
information. Information delivery must support the regular production reporting cycles of the
organization as well as the instantaneous ad hoc requests that arise.
Process Management, Workflow and Alerts: A rich performance management platform should meet an
organization’s workflow and approval needs. Users can define a set of process steps to cover any
administrative process, including assigning ownership and due dates and then tracking the completion of
these steps. Fully documented workflows can be maintained with detailed steps–parallel or
dependent, as appropriate–with clear delineation of ownership, while alerts can notify owners and
stakeholders as needed. Finally, it provides a permanent audit trail for the process, including who
completed a task and when.
www.axiomepm.com

10. www.axiomepm.com
SPREADSHEETS AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT / 10
Why many software programs fall short
Excel “add-ons”
The popularity of Excel has led nearly all performance management vendors to offer an Excel add-in to their solution.
However, this “bolt on” approach often falls woefully short of providing what users want. In most cases, Excel is little
more than a lens looking into a complex database where the core business logic is created and managed. While this
may strike some as ideal, the result is less than optimal. Relegating the calculation logic to database script typically
results in either a system too unruly to maintain, or one that’s too simple to model the enterprise.
The lack of user friendliness inherent with script-based systems causes users to either give up attempting any level of
sophistication within their models or work “off-line” in Excel for rogue modeling deemed too cumbersome or
complex for the core system.

11. www.axiomepm.com
SPREADSHEETS AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT / 11
Why Axiom EPM is the natural choice
User-based security
Process management, automated
workflow, alerts and notifications
Integrate data from any internal or
external source
Highly scalable and flexible ROLAP
data model
Complex modeling to the most
granular levels
Finance owned and maintained
with limited IT support
Flexible and quick modeling
Syntax known to office of Finance
Familiar User Interface
Robust modeling application
Hundreds of functions and rich
formatting options
Owned and managed by Finance
Why Axiom EPM?
Axiom EPM recognizes and delivers what users like about spreadsheets while solving what’s problematic about them.
By embracing the finance friendly nature of Excel and expanding upon its capabilities in order to address the needs of
the enterprise, Axiom EPM allows finance teams to retain all of what they know and love about Excel, while having
financial governance, corporate standards and process efficiency needs met as well. The result is both “sides” are
addressed with negligible sacrifice. Further, the Axiom EPM relational data architecture, combined with a modeling
layer based on Excel, fully supports virtually ALL planning requirements, allowing decision makers the ability to
quickly model proposed initiatives and make dynamic inserts of data on-the-fly without significant effort.

12. www.axiomepm.com
SPREADSHEETS AND PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT / 12
Within the realm of financial budgeting and planning, there will always be arguments for and against Excel’s
capabilities, but despite its faults and deficiencies, any attempts to replace or eliminate the spreadsheet have
fallen short. To overcome Excel’s shortcomings, organizations should leverage a performance management
solution that expands upon the finance-friendly nature of Excel while eliminating the error-prone
functionalities of standalone spreadsheets to satisfy both the departments of finance and IT.
AXIOM EPM’s UNIFIED PERFORMANCE
MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS
Alleviating repetitive, labor-
intensive tasks and
streamlining performance
management operations
enables organizations to
better focus on
strengthening operational
processes, resulting in more
profitable growth and an
overall greater user
experience.