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Spreadsheet Advantage

By: Philip Howard
Format: InDetail
Published: May 2007

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The market for providing complementary products to Microsoft Excel comes from two directions: business intelligence vendors aiming to provide additional functionality, especially in the area of automation and development, and a second group of suppliers that address this market from the perspective of governance and compliance, providing the auditing, security and control that is lacking in Excel. In this latter category there are two broad categories of products: control and compliance tools and auditor’s tools. Spreadsheet Advantage’s suite of tools addresses the auditor’s market.

Note that auditors in this context covers two distinct functions: in the first instance, best practice in the development of spreadsheets is for a segregation of roles between the author, editor, auditor and user of spreadsheets, where auditor in this context refers to a function that is internal to the company. Needless to say, auditing is also an external function. In fact, Spreadsheet Advantage is suitable for use by both internal and external auditors. However, a further point to appreciate is that the more that you have internal processes in place (such as the segregation of roles) to ensure the validity of your spreadsheets, then the less work will be required by external auditors and the lower their resulting fees. In other words, implementing internal auditing processes will save money not just because you are basing your decisions on more accurate and reliable information but also through reduced annual fees.

Specifically, Spreadsheet Advantage includes tools for row and column alignments, sheet comparisons, spreadsheet analysis, circularity discovery, a sheet mapping tool that allows you to see the structure of your spreadsheets, and precedent and dependent analysis, amongst others.