In financial control, one recurring task holds enormous significance: the monthly budget review. It’s a critical moment where budget holders examine the departmental profit and loss statements, identify anomalies, and flag issues to the finance team before final numbers are reported. And yet, across countless organizations, this step is routinely skipped or delayed—not because it’s unimportant, but because the process is broken.
This article demonstrates why that happens, how it can be fixed, and what that tells us about the two parallel worlds of Excel—one that dominates social media and training content, and another that quietly holds the key to real enterprise transformation.
The Problem: Budget Review Is Essential—But Practically Impossible
From the CFO’s viewpoint, budget review is not optional. It’s essential for ensuring the financials reflect reality. Every department head should verify that costs and revenues are correctly recorded. A miscoded invoice or an early expense accrual can distort profitability, not just for one unit, but across the entire organization via consolidated reports.
And yet, in practice, this review often doesn’t happen—especially not in the critical 1-2 day window after the finance team has finalized journal entries but before management reporting is due.
Why? Because asking 60 or 400 budget holders to log into unfamiliar ERP systems, navigate clunky screens, and run reports outside their normal workflow is a fantasy. The result: no review takes place. Errors go undetected until it’s too late. Fixes happen in the following month. The data becomes unreliable. And slowly but surely, management loses confidence in the accounts.
The Standard Approach: Painting Inside the Purple Squares
So what do most people do instead?
They download reports from the ERP system into Excel, sift through rows of transactions, and—if they’re diligent—add comments or make comparisons between sheets to piece together the story. Then they email their findings back to the finance team.
This is the spreadsheet hell so often described by critics of Excel: 400 different versions of the truth, 400 different methods, and a finance team drowning in inconsistencies.
Yet this is precisely what modern Excel influencers—experts who are experts on experts—train people to do. Tutorials on VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, Power Query, dynamic arrays, and pivot tables are all designed to help users paint neatly inside their little purple square.
But what if the real job is not to paint one square better—but to paint the entire wall?
The Better Way: The Spray Gun Approach
Enter the second world of Excel—a world almost no one talks about. A world where Excel becomes the front-end to a centralized, relational database.
Here’s how it works, demonstrated through a real-life budget review template.
Each budget holder receives a simple Excel file with one sheet. They open it. Their department code is already entered. They click a button: GET. The sheet populates with a draft profit and loss statement, drawn live from the database. Variances are highlighted.
They spot a strange cost in April that actually relates to an exhibition budgeted in September. They select the cell, see the list of underlying transactions, and add a note: “This should be posted in September—prepayment.” Then they click PUT.
Done. In minutes.
No downloads. No formulas. No training. No Power Query. No admin. Just domain knowledge being applied to the problem it was meant to solve.
On the finance side, the team opens a consolidated workbook and clicks GET. Every issue from across the organization flows into one sheet. Journal entries can be triggered automatically. Progress is tracked. Transparency is built-in.
What’s the Catch?
There isn’t one—except this: no one is teaching this.
Not on LinkedIn. Not on YouTube. Not in webinars. All the Excel education content—yes, 100% of it—leads to the first scenario. None of it leads to the second.
Why?
Because the first world—the purple square world—is where the masses are. It’s where the views are. It’s where the sales are. It’s where the tools are easiest to promote and the problems are easiest to explain.
But management doesn’t live there.
Management doesn’t want 400 budget holders emailing 400 spreadsheets. They want a spray gun.
Two Worlds. One Truth.
There are two worlds of Excel.
One that’s been overhyped, oversold, and ultimately unscalable. The other—quiet, invisible, powerful—built on principles of enterprise architecture that have existed since the 1990s.
The second world uses technologies that ship with Microsoft Office: VBA and ADO (ActiveX Data Objects). These are not hacks. These are stable, mature technologies that were at the heart of Microsoft’s own digital nervous system strategy. They allow Excel to read from and write to any database, including Access and SQL Server.
The spray gun is real. It’s built-in. And it works.
Why This Matters
This article is not just about budget review. It’s about a mindset shift.
If we continue to direct Excel users only toward painting their purple squares better, we will continue to build systems that break under pressure. We will continue to miss enterprise opportunities. We will continue to spend millions on ERP and FP&A tools that don’t solve the real problems.
But if we show users how Excel can be used as a front-end to a live database—where data flows, not files—then we unlock a world of possibilities: scalable workflows, instant reporting, true collaboration.
And we won’t just be fixing Excel. We’ll be fixing the very foundation of enterprise reporting and performance management.
Final Thought
The greatest irony? Even the influencers, experts, and experts-on-experts—when shown both scenarios—agree that the second one is better. But they don’t know how to build it. Or worse, they do—and won’t say.
That’s why I’m saying it. And why I’ll continue demonstrating it.
Because there’s a better way. It’s already in Excel. And it’s time we all learned to use the spray gun.
Interested in learning how to build the second world of Excel? Stay tuned. Because this is just the beginning.
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