There’s a reason nearly 90% of CFOs still swear by Excel. It’s familiar, flexible, and powerful for what it does.
Yet, nearly half admit they need better financial forecasting tools.
As your workflows become more complex and data needs more dynamic, spreadsheets are beginning to show their restrictions. While still valuable for certain tasks, they can become a limitation when your team needs speed, accuracy, and real-time visibility at scale.
It’s time to upgrade your accounts payable (AP) tasks by bringing automation to accounting. When you incorporate an AP automation solution into your workflow, you eliminate errors, speed up approvals, and get real-time financial insights.
In this article, we’ll explore where spreadsheets still serve a purpose, where they fall short, and how AP automation can complement your finance processes for the future.
Pros of Excel
When we say Excel, you think of ease of use, and that’s what makes it a popular choice for businesses. The layout is simple, so whether you're tracking sales, managing budgets, or analysing financial data, you can jump straight in without needing any special training.
Another big plus? The ready-made templates and built-in formulas. Instead of starting from scratch, you can use pre-designed spreadsheets for budgeting, forecasting, or expense tracking. And with formulas already set up, you can automate calculations, save time, and avoid mistakes.
We spoke to a few finance professionals about Excel, and they all agreed that Excel is the go-to tool for analysing financial data, especially for businesses without fancy business intelligence software. Whether keeping an eye on profit and loss or just making sense of the numbers.
Another thing they pointed out is that Excel is a must-have when moving data between systems. Whether you’re transferring customer lists, supplier records, or employee details, it helps pull everything together in one place. With data coming from all over, having a tool that keeps it organised makes all the difference!
Limitations of Excel
While Excel is great, it has its downsides, especially when multiple people in your business use the same spreadsheet. In the last 7 years, Excel saw a declining trend in its usage. In 2018, 63% of U.S. businesses relied on Excel, but by 2019, that number had dropped to 54%.
Here’s where the cracks start to show:
Whether it’s a new invoice, payment, or adjustment, with Excel, you have to enter the data manually every single time. If you forget to update something, the consequences can be big: accurate reporting goes out the window, and your financial data becomes unreliable. The more you rely on manual entries, the higher the risk of errors, making it difficult to trust your reports and make informed decisions.
In a study, 41% of finance teams faced issues identifying and correcting errors, while 19% were far from confident in presenting Excel data to leadership. It’s all too easy for someone to accidentally overwrite formulas, change the formatting, or use it in a way that only makes sense to them. You might make updates to the spreadsheet for a good reason, but if no one else understands why, things can quickly get messy. And let’s be honest, who hasn’t had an “Excel panic moment”?
Managing large datasets is where Excel starts to show its limits further. Your spreadsheet becomes an overwhelming maze of tabs, links, and formulas as your business grows. What was once a simple tool for your team quickly turns into a tangled mess, making it harder to find what you need, track your numbers, and stay organised.
If any of this sounds familiar, it might be time to consider automation.
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Why Switch to an AP Automation Platform?
Why Switch to an AP Automation Platform?
AP automation breaks past Excel’s limits and provides you with instant benefits.
One of its biggest advantages? An 83% reduction in manual data entry. With automation, invoices are captured, processed, and matched automatically, eliminating the need for you to enter data manually. This saves your time and ensures your financial data is accurate and reconciliation happens automatically. For example, Stonehaven Cave Group automated their invoicing process, freeing their finance team from hours of data entry. Now, instead of spending time keying in information, they focus on higher-value strategic work that drives business growth.
Additionally, automation can help you reduce data review and error checks by 90%. With Excel’s manual process, your team probably spends hours double-checking data for discrepancies, whether matching purchase orders to invoices or verifying payment details. In contrast, AP automation handles these tasks automatically for you. The system cross-references invoices against purchase orders and goods received in real-time, flagging any mismatches or errors. Take WhiteWater, for example. Since they implemented invoice automation, their finance team now spends just seconds checking data before exporting it straight to their accounting software.
Moreover, scalability is not an issue with automation, unlike Excel. AP automation can handle the load as your transaction volume increases by making your AP processes standardised and consistent. This allows the system to process invoices at the same speed, whether you have 100 or 1,000 invoices to manage. Windmill NI automated 80% of AP documents by implementing invoice automation software. This helped the team scale without the pressure of employee shortages or delayed month-ends.
When automation takes care of your growing invoice volume, you turn time-consuming tasks into a fraction of the effort. The approval process is no different. Automation sends invoices straight to the right people in the approval chain, no matter where they are or what time it is. Withington Girls' School cut their approval time from 2 weeks to 1 day with AP automation software. Thanks to faster approvals, they can pay suppliers more quickly and improve cash flow management.
Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Think of Excel as a great starting point or even a reliable backup. But when it’s time to scale, streamline, and sharpen your finance operations, AP automation is the way forward.
You can get your AP platform up and running in weeks, not months! It’s a quick, easy transition that frees up your time for more strategic tasks while ensuring your AP processes stay efficient and error-free.
Other resources
EBOOK
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Join our live webinar to see how Lightyear works to enhance AP processes across your business.
