Excel compliance tracker after you edit it

The relationship between tax people and Excel is… well uhm… complicated… Sure, Excel has benefits. A lot. But at the same time, we need to be mindful of its limitations.

Below are some pros and cons:

✅ Flexible
✅ Affordable
✅ We have extensive experience working with it
✅ Fairly doable to ingest data from source systems
✅ Easy to have BI / VI on top of it

⛔️ We produce too many Excels. For every job a different Excel
⛔️ Data gets isolated in these Excel sheets
⛔️ Low to no governance possibilities
⛔️ Limited access right management
⛔️ Very suboptimal audit trails
⛔️ “Artistic freedom” - every person builds Excel files differently
⛔️ What is the latest version aka “final31122023-v2-edited-clean”
⛔️ In the end, it remains a generic tool, not verticalised for tax…

Whenever I hear people complaining about how difficult it is to keep e.g. tax compliance trackers in Excel, something I hear very often, I completely feel their pain. I have been there myself. Rest assured that there are much better solutions out there. Tools that you need in any case, in a tax landscape subject to continuous change and with overall complexity skyrocketing.