Advantages and Disadvantages of Spreadsheets in Accounting

Advantages and Disadvantages of Spreadsheets in Accounting

27/08/2021Accountants , Accounting

Strategic planning is fundamental in business and requires substantial information in order to make key choices. Therefore, choosing the right tool for creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting data will offer assistance to managers and business proprietors so that they can make the leading choices for their company’s trade.  The spreadsheet is a software tool to capture, show and control information  organized in lines and columns. Spreadsheets are well-known among bookkeepers and among those who like to gather and track information. However, a few restrictions may not make them the finest choice for each office application. Let’s explore the advantages and disadvantages of spreadsheets.

 

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Advantages and Disadvantages of Spreadsheets

Advantages

The advantages of spreadsheets are as follows:

1. Simple Payment Tracking

Owners of small businesses and people who are new to accounting find it challenging to keep a record of payments; spreadsheets offer a simple solution. It is usually utilised to inspect the amount of money that has been spent and received. They permit you to split up the money you’ve paid and earned by time and resources. For instance, you can identify different types of spending, e.g., insurance or rent, and by using a simple table, you can keep a log of exactly how much can be spent on these expenditures every month.

 

2. Related Data Linking

Linking worksheets together is another advantage of spreadsheets. This is very helpful for cash flow in which, at the end of last month, you are required to link the actual balance in the bank to the opening balance for this month. You can do this by pressing = within the cell you need to link from and putting the cursor within the cell you need to link to. 

 

3. Useful Formatting

 You want a simple and easy tool to navigate, when working with lots of budgetary information. Gratefully, most spreadsheet program offers several tools to assist you in making your spreadsheets visually engaging and simple to understand. For instance, you’ll be able to utilise Ctrl + I, and the chosen cell will form all of the content in that cell italic. You might, too, select the colour code cells and, after that, sort your information by colour.

 

4. Spreadsheet Functions

Several formulas such that the sum functions, if statements, and lookup functions help accountants handle finances accurately, quickly, and more efficiently.

 

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pros and cons of spreadsheet

 

Disadvantages

Disadvantages of spreadsheets are as follows:

1. Vulnerable to Fraud

Lack of controls is the reason behind spreadsheet vulnerability, making it so simple to modify either equations, values, or conditions without being recognised.

 

2. More Chances of Human Errors

It is a more critical risk than fraud, and because of it, you’ll truly think to get rid of this outdated software. Missing a negative sign or typing the “+” sign instead of “-” can make all your calculations wrong.

 

3. Difficult for Sharing Internally, Scaling & Data Visualising

In case a single individual is overseeing the spreadsheet, it works well. But if there are more individuals added to the team, it’d be troublesome to share and modify information with the entire team.

Moreover, assembling visual data (charts, graphs) and scaling large spreadsheets are challenging to deal with.

 

Final Thoughts

We will conclude our blog by saying that you should be well aware of the advantages and disadvantages of spreadsheets for utilizing spreadsheets in your business. For small businesses, you can use spreadsheets. But if you are running a medium-scale or a large company, we will not recommend you use spreadsheets as a large amount of data is difficult to manage. Therefore, you need to use alternative software to run your business operations accurately and efficiently.

 

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