When a throwaway LinkedIn comment deserves to be tested
By Hiran de Silva
A few weeks ago, something rather extraordinary happened on LinkedIn.
It began innocently enough.
Danielle Stein Fairhurst, one of the best-known and most respected figures in Excel financial modelling, had hosted a webinar featuring Bob Umlas.
Bob is himself a veteran of the Excel world. He belongs to a generation of practitioners whose involvement with Excel stretches back decades, alongside names such as Chip Pearson, Stephen Bullen, Bill Manville, Myrna Larson and Tom Ogilvy.
These are people who helped build the professional Excel community long before LinkedIn influencers, YouTube algorithms and AI-generated thought leadership existed.
Danielle subsequently posted about the webinar on LinkedIn.
And into that discussion stepped Kevin McMahon.
His intervention was unexpected.
His essential message appeared to be that Excel was retro: a technology belonging to another age, increasingly irrelevant to modern financial work.
That, by itself, would have been unremarkable.
People are perfectly entitled to believe that Excel is obsolete. Indeed, an entire software industry has spent decades making essentially that argument.
But McMahon went considerably further.
He suggested that work being performed in Excel could instead be accomplished in seconds using Jirav and AI.
And then came the comment that changed the nature of the discussion.
He expressed the hope that Danielle did not “charge by the hour.”
That is a very different proposition.
It carries an obvious implication: that Excel professionals might choose Excel because it takes longer, thereby allowing them to charge clients for more time.
That deserves scrutiny.
Enter Trading Standards
I decided not to respond with another opinion.
Instead, I created an investigation.
Regular readers may already have met my fictional investigative team: Fairfax “Fair” Trading and Goldie Standards.
Together, they are Trading Standards.
Think of them as fact-checkers for technology claims.
Their job is not to defend Excel because I happen to use Excel.
Their job is to ask a much simpler question:
Can the claim actually be demonstrated?
This matters because the argument is much bigger than a disagreement on LinkedIn.
Claims about Excel being obsolete, unsuitable or inherently inefficient are made constantly. They influence spreadsheet professionals. They influence finance teams. And, much more importantly, they can influence senior management deciding how major business problems should be solved.
A sufficiently persuasive claim can ultimately influence technology investments worth millions.
So rather than trade slogans, let’s test the proposition.
The Budget Review Challenge
For this investigation, I have proposed a benchmark.
I call it the Budget Review Challenge.
It represents a perfectly plausible problem in a large organisation.
Imagine that monthly accounts are approaching completion.
There are hundreds of budget holders across the organisation.
Historically, the accounts have sometimes been distributed before those budget holders have properly reviewed them.
The result is predictable.
The accounts go out.
Then the complaints begin.
A cost has been allocated incorrectly.
Something is missing.
A figure requires explanation.
A journal hasn’t been processed.
A manager disputes a transaction.
Even where a number is technically correct, its business explanation may be incomplete.
And once incorrect or incomplete accounts become the official numbers, the consequences spread.
Subsequent corrections distort later periods. Forecasting and FP&A processes consume those numbers. Management analysis consumes them. Decisions are made from them.
Management therefore introduces a new requirement:
Before the monthly accounts are finalised, every relevant budget holder must have an opportunity to review and approve them.
There is, however, a catch.
Time.
Month-end processing itself cannot magically be completed days earlier.
So the organisation establishes a 48-hour review window.
At the beginning of that window, the finance team’s draft numbers are made available.
Each budget holder must be able to obtain their own accounts.
They must be able to examine the figures.
They must be able to drill down into the underlying transactions.
They must identify anything they dispute.
They must communicate corrections or explanations back to Finance.
Finance must process the necessary adjustments.
The budget holders must then review the revised position.
And ultimately they must indicate that they concur with the numbers.
All of that must happen across potentially hundreds of people.
Within 48 hours.
That is the challenge.
Now we have something we can actually compare
This is where the discussion becomes interesting.
Forget slogans such as Modern Excel, Excel Hell, AI-powered finance or digital transformation.
Here is the business requirement.
Show me your solution.
I am happy to put the challenge to everybody.
Put it to Anaplan.
Put it to Workday Adaptive Planning.
Put it to Planful.
Put it to Vena.
Put it to Datarails.
Put it to ERP vendors.
Put it to corporate IT departments.
Put it to traditional Excel users.
Put it to the Modern Excel community.
Put it to the AI-assisted finance community.
And put it to me.
We can then compare the proposed solutions on things that actually matter: implementation effort, scalability, flexibility, user experience, auditability, collaboration, maintainability, cost and, above all, whether the solution satisfies the business requirement.
That seems rather more useful than arguing about whether a particular technology is retro.
My Excel solution
There is another important element to the experiment.
I am prepared to show my solution.
It uses Excel.
But it does not treat Excel as hundreds of isolated files flying around the organisation.
It uses the architecture I have been advocating for many years: Excel as the client to a central relational database.
The Digital Librarian.
The database becomes the hub.
The spreadsheets become the spokes.
A budget holder does not need Finance to email another spreadsheet.
The workbook retrieves the information that particular manager is authorised to see.
The manager can review the P&L.
They can move through the organisational hierarchy.
They can drill down to the transactions behind a number.
And information can travel in the opposite direction as well.
The manager can submit comments, explanations, status information or other review data back to the central source.
Finance can see the developing position across the organisation.
Adjustments can be made.
The budget holder can refresh.
The revised information appears.
The process continues until review is complete.
Hundreds of people can participate independently while working against a common central source of data.
That is what I mean by Global Excel.
And the striking thing is not merely that Excel can do this.
It is how little is required to build it.
The prototype can be constructed in hours rather than requiring some enormous software implementation programme.
Which brings us back to Kevin McMahon
Kevin’s proposition was considerably more dramatic.
The suggestion was that Jirav combined with AI makes the laborious Excel approach unnecessary because the work can be accomplished in seconds.
Excellent.
Then the Budget Review Challenge should provide a useful demonstration.
Here is a defined business problem.
Here is an Excel solution.
Now show us the alternative.
If Jirav and AI can produce an equivalent solution in seconds, I genuinely want to see it.
It would be extraordinary.
And useful.
But this is precisely why technology claims need to be tested rather than merely repeated.
The gauntlet was thrown down
I asked Kevin about his position on the LinkedIn thread.
I did not attack him.
I did not dismiss his argument.
I deliberately approached the matter politely and expressed curiosity about what he meant and the thinking behind his claim.
That gave him the opportunity to explain.
So far, he hasn’t.
And that leaves us in a curious position.
Kevin arrived in a discussion involving two long-established Excel professionals, made a provocative assertion about the technology they use, implied that Excel practitioners might financially benefit from taking longer to perform work, promoted Jirav and AI as an alternative capable of doing the work in seconds—and then, when asked to elaborate, apparently disappeared.
It is rather like dropping a grenade into the room and running away.
But the grenade is still sitting there.
So Trading Standards is going to examine it.
There is another witness we can call
There is an obvious next stage in the investigation.
Ask Jirav.
That may be the fairest test of all.
Rather than assuming Kevin accurately represented the capabilities of the product, put the Budget Review Challenge directly to the company.
Here is the requirement.
Here is what the Excel implementation does.
Can Jirav provide the equivalent?
If so, how?
How much configuration is involved?
How long would implementation realistically take?
Can the system accommodate the bespoke workflow?
Can hundreds of budget holders independently retrieve their relevant information, drill into transactions, communicate their findings, receive revised information and sign off—all within the required review window?
Perhaps it can.
If it can, I would like to see it.
If it cannot, then Kevin’s original assertion becomes considerably more difficult to defend.
This isn’t really about Kevin McMahon
There is a larger reason I am pursuing this.
Social media is awash with technology claims.
Excel is broken.
Spreadsheets don’t scale.
Excel is dead.
AI makes traditional modelling obsolete.
Modern finance teams don’t use spreadsheets.
This product eliminates Excel Hell.
The language is often dramatic.
The evidence is frequently less so.
And increasingly, I see material that appears designed primarily to provoke engagement rather than illuminate a genuine business or technological issue.
A dramatic claim is posted.
People react.
The algorithm notices.
And everyone moves on.
But business technology shouldn’t be evaluated like that.
If somebody says a technology cannot perform a task, demonstrate the limitation.
If somebody says another technology can perform the same task in seconds, demonstrate that too.
Give us the business problem.
Give us the requirements.
Give us the proposed architecture.
Give us the solution.
Then we can have a meaningful conversation.
The investigation remains open
So that is where the Kevin McMahon matter stands today.
There has been no verdict.
There doesn’t need to be one yet.
Kevin remains perfectly welcome to explain what he meant.
He can demonstrate how he would approach the Budget Review Challenge.
Jirav is equally welcome to explain whether Kevin’s description fairly represents what its technology can do.
And anyone else who believes that Excel is the wrong technology for this challenge is invited to propose something better.
That is the purpose of the exercise.
Not to prove that Excel wins automatically.
Not to prove that another product loses automatically.
But to replace marketing claims, social-media provocation and technological tribalism with something much simpler:
Here is the business problem.
Show us how you would solve it.
My solution is on the table.
The challenge is on the table.
Trading Standards is investigating.
And Kevin McMahon has yet to answer.
Watch this space.
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