Spreadsheet junkies should beware irate IT managers looking for ways to solve the Excel compliance nightmare. They may want to toss out Excel altogether. The more tolerant, however, are embracing software tools that provide data integrity and security to the otherwise undisciplined Excel.
Take, for example, Mike Hader, the IT manager at closely held Madison, Tenn.-based Odom's Tennessee Pride Sausage Inc., a regional sausage maker with national ambitions. His co-workers in finance love spreadsheets, despite Excel's worrisome Sarbanes-Oxley limitations. Much to their relief, Hader introduced them to e.Spreadsheet, a reporting software product from San Francisco-based Actuate Corp. "All the report tools that are on the marketplace allow you to export a report to an Excel file, but the problem is when you do that, you lose your formatting," says Hader. "The more complicated the report, the worse the impact when you try to import it."
Actuate's product creates spreadsheets that are readable within Excel, so there is no need to export the data. "It gives us in IT the assurance of data integrity," says Hader.
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Actuate and other vendors, such as Westborough, Mass.-based Applix Inc., offer spreadsheet-based planning, forecasting, reporting, analysis and performance tools that purport to be Sarbanes-Oxley compliant. How? Actuate and Applix ensure data integrity and consistency through centralized server-based business intelligence (BI) platforms, known as iServer and TM1 OLAP (online analytical processing), respectively. "They are really the two with the most sophisticated server-based spreadsheet enhancement," says Philip Russom, principal analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc.
This month, Actuate is introducing cell-locking and matrix script features. When cells are locked, they can't be overwritten unless a user has permission. Analysts say that while that's intrinsic to many budgeting and forecasting applications, e.Spreadsheet can be used for any sort of analysis. The matrix script feature allows companies to create "live" Excel spreadsheets, complete with formulas and graphs, and cell-locking lets them distribute those "live" spreadsheets and permit anyone to perform "what-if" analyses while protecting the data from alteration.
To be sure, Excel plug-ins are ubiquitous, and not surprisingly, Microsoft Corp. offers a BI-based tool called Reporting Services. Only a few focus on making Excel more bulletproof from a control standpoint. "Many of the add-ins you find for Excel are more about computational ability rather than reliability of the information," says Eric Rogge, research director at Belmont, Calif.-based Ventana Research. Other vendors, like Informatica Corp. and Business Objects SA, address Excel-related compliance by restricting access to specific users and creating integration platforms that provide a record of data changes.
Actuate and Applix can also guard against the control leaks that occur when spreadsheets are passed around via e-mail. Their BI technologies allow data to be drawn automatically from multiple sources while maintaining a spreadsheet's original formulas. Without a server-based solution, Russom says, companies must create airtight policies for spreadsheets–something that's virtually impossible to enforce.
The total cost to Odom's for Actuate's iServer and e.Spreadsheet: $100,000. Says Hader: "It was the best money we ever spent. "
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