An Open Challenge to Workday Adaptive Planning: Addressing the Nine Circles of Excel Hell

I am familiar with the white paper published by Adaptive Planning (now Workday Adaptive Planning) about a decade ago, titled Nine Circles of Excel Hell. This document outlines nine areas where Excel is deemed deficient when deployed in an enterprise setting, drawing an analogy to Dante’s Inferno. In fact, the original version of the white paper included the claim that, “When Dante wrote his famous Inferno, he must have been thinking of Excel.”

I previously wrote to Adaptive Planning to challenge this assertion but never received a response. Despite its age, this white paper remains in circulation, with the latest edition published within the last couple of years. The core argument of the white paper is that Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) belongs in the cloud and not in Excel. It presents nine specific deficiencies of Excel and positions a cloud-based FP&A solution—specifically, Workday Adaptive Planning—as the superior alternative.

The Role of FP&A and the General Ledger

At its core, FP&A involves reporting business performance, often derived from the general ledger, which records all business transactions. Each month, an ERP system generates financial statements—such as profit and loss statements and balance sheets—that are distributed across the company. These reports are crucial for management, particularly in understanding financial performance across different regions, cities, products, operations, and cost centers.

A Common Enterprise Challenge

This open challenge to Workday Adaptive Planning focuses on a common and fundamental requirement in any enterprise: ensuring budget holders review financial statements before finalization. This step is critical because the finance team, including the CFO, lacks detailed operational knowledge, and only budget holders can validate whether all relevant transactions are accurately captured.

The goal is to enable budget holders to efficiently review draft financial statements, flag any discrepancies, and provide feedback to the finance team before the accounts are finalized. The question is: Can this process be effectively managed using Excel in a cloud-based environment? Or is Workday Adaptive Planning’s claim that Excel is unsuitable for enterprise FP&A justified?

Demonstrating an Excel-Based Solution

Consider a scenario where a global bicycle retail company operates with:

• 400 operating units in 90 cities across 50 countries, organized into four regions.
• Two additional group structures based on responsibility management and legal entities.

Before finalizing accounts, budget holders must review profit and loss statements, identify errors, and confirm accuracy. Here’s how an Excel-based cloud solution meets this challenge:

1. Each budget holder receives a lightweight Excel workbook (~25KB) that is dynamically linked to cloud-stored financial data.
2. Budget holders select their operating unit from a dropdown list (limited to their scope of responsibility) and retrieve the latest draft financials.
3. They review line items, drill down into transaction-level details, and flag any discrepancies—such as incorrect prepayments, missing accruals, or misallocated expenses.
4. Comments and adjustments are recorded within the spreadsheet and instantly saved to the cloud.
5. Finance teams aggregate all budget holder feedback via a centralized Excel dashboard, allowing for swift review and correction.
6. A final validation step enables budget holders to confirm accuracy before reports are distributed.
7. The process is completed efficiently within minutes, without requiring proprietary software.

Addressing the White Paper’s Claims

The Nine Circles of Excel Hell paper argues that Excel is unsuitable for FP&A in an enterprise setting. However, the solution demonstrated above contradicts this claim. Specifically:

• Data integrity: The process ensures data accuracy and auditability by leveraging cloud storage.
• Version control: No risk of outdated files, as all data is centrally managed in a cloud-based system.
• Collaboration: Multiple users contribute simultaneously without conflicts.
• Scalability: The model efficiently supports hundreds of users and thousands of transactions.
• Security: Data access is controlled via permissions and encryption.
• Flexibility: Users can tailor Excel models to specific enterprise needs without vendor lock-in.
• Accessibility: Excel is universally available, familiar, and requires no specialized training.
• Affordability: No additional software licenses or implementation costs are required.

The Challenge to Workday Adaptive Planning

Workday Adaptive Planning’s white paper suggests that FP&A belongs in the cloud. However, Excel itself is a cloud-enabled tool when integrated properly. In fact, the demonstrated solution shows that Excel can leverage cloud storage effectively, making FP&A more agile, accessible, and cost-efficient than proprietary alternatives.

Thus, I pose this challenge to Workday Adaptive Planning:

1. Can your solution provide an equally efficient and scalable process for budget holder financial review?
2. If not, why does your white paper dismiss Excel when it demonstrably meets enterprise FP&A needs?
3. Will you retract or revise the Nine Circles of Excel Hell publication to reflect these realities?

This is an open call for an explanation—one that is long overdue, given the continued circulation of this publication for over a decade. The burden is now on Workday Adaptive Planning to substantiate its claims.

The ball is in your court. What is your response?

Podcast by Hiran de Silva. Narrated by Bill.