By Hiran de Silva
Are you impressed by cloud-based planning tools?
Perhaps you’ve watched demonstrations from Anaplan, Workday Adaptive Planning, Planful, DataRails, or similar platforms.
And perhaps you’ve thought:
“That’s impressive.”
The global reach.
The collaboration.
The governance.
The scalability.
The ability to bring hundreds of users together around a single version of the truth.
But at the same time, there’s something holding you back.
Because you also know the strengths of Excel.
Its flexibility.
Its accessibility.
Its transparency.
Its affordability.
Its ubiquity throughout the business.
And so you’re left with a dilemma.
Do you abandon the agility and control that Excel gives you in exchange for the power of an external planning platform?
Or do you keep Excel and accept the limitations that people tell you it has?
What if that isn’t actually a choice you need to make?
What if you could have the very capabilities that attract organisations to cloud-based planning tools…
while retaining the flexibility, transparency, ownership, and control of Excel?
That’s what this demonstration is about.
What you’re about to see delivers the same enterprise capabilities that are commonly associated with modern planning platforms:
Global reach.
Multi-user collaboration.
Centralised data.
Consolidation.
Governance.
Auditability.
Workflow.
Historical archives.
Scalability.
But it is built entirely using Excel as the client, connected to a centrally accessible database under your control.
Your design.
Your data.
Your business rules.
Your infrastructure.
No black box.
No dependency on a vendor’s interpretation of your business.
No requirement to export data simply to get it back into Excel.
The data is already yours.
The architecture is already yours.
The control remains yours.
And perhaps most importantly, this approach is not dependent on a large IT programme.
It can be designed and implemented by the business itself.
In fact, this demonstration is based on techniques developed and deployed in real organisations over many years, solving real planning, budgeting, consolidation, and reporting challenges.
So let me show you something that surprises many finance leaders.
The capabilities they admired in enterprise planning software…
delivered entirely with Excel.
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