By Susan Beall, Founder & CEO, Decerio
Most Companies Don’t Suffer from a Lack of Data. They Suffer from a Lack of Visibility.
Critical decisions get delayed because data is fragmented across systems, planning is disconnected from execution, forecasting is inconsistent, and reporting only catches up to operational reality after the fact. The cost compounds quickly. It shows up as silent margin erosion. As forecasting misses you only see in the rearview mirror. As opportunities that pass while a workbook is still being reconciled.
I want to write directly to a particular reader: the CFO who built — or maintains — the Excel model that runs your business. The CFO who debugs the model in their head, who can answer almost any question with it, and who has, rightly, refused to give it up.
Excel Can Do More Than Its Critics Give It Credit For
Most of the conversation about CFOs and spreadsheets is unfairly dismissive of what a disciplined Excel model can deliver. A well-maintained workbook can model indirect rates against actuals. It can integrate variable inputs from pipeline through contract outlook through cost refinement. It can attribute variance, run scenarios, and hold complex calculation logic that took years to build and earns its keep every cycle.
The best CFOs I have worked with own those models, and they are right to be proud of what they have built.
The argument, then, is not that Excel cannot do these things. The argument is that doing them in Excel comes with a set of costs your organization is paying every cycle — and the cost grows with complexity, the cost grows with size, and the cost grows quietly enough that it is rarely the line item anyone tries to fix.
The cost is not capability. It is everything else. I have heard versions of all of these from CFOs and Controllers in the last year:
- “I am wasting hours trying to fix formulas in Excel. Every budgeting cycle feels like a grind. I am stuck double-checking formulas instead of analyzing real data.”
- “I cannot keep track of the latest version of our budget. Team members keep sending updated spreadsheets, and I do not even know which one is the most current anymore.”
- “We cannot react fast enough to changes. When leadership asks for an updated forecast, I feel like I am scrambling to piece everything together.”
When the question turns to consolidation, the language gets sharper:
- “I am drowning in spreadsheets trying to consolidate data. Pulling together information from different divisions is a nightmare, and I am terrified I am missing something important.”
- “I feel like we are operating in silos. Each team is working off its own data, and it is impossible to get a clear picture of how we are performing.”
- “I am constantly fixing mistakes caused by manual roll-ups. There is too much room for error, and it is costing us time and credibility.”
These quotes are not from CFOs who do not know how to use Excel. They are from CFOs who use it superbly, every day, and have hit the ceiling of what the workbook can do for the organization that surrounds them.
The Cost That Matters Most Is the One Nobody Talks About: Concentrated Visibility
Most Excel-driven finance organizations have one, two, or three people with access to the master model. Every path to information flows through those people. They are the keepers of the workbook. They are the only ones who know which version is current. They are the only ones who can run a what-if. When leadership wants a number, the organization waits. When a business unit wants to see the impact of a decision, the organization waits. When the board asks for a refresh, the keepers stay late.
That is not a tool problem. It is a structural one. And it shows up in language CFOs and Controllers know well: information concentrated in a small group, paths to insight that flow through one office, an organization that operates on yesterday’s snapshot because nobody has time to refresh today’s.
Extreme Visibility cannot live in a workbook only two people have access to. The best CFO in the world cannot share what only they can see. And the rest of the organization cannot act on visibility that lives in someone else’s spreadsheet.
This is the part of the conversation that has nothing to do with Excel’s capability. It has to do with what visibility means when an organization has to act on it together.
What Decerio Is, and What We Do
Decerio is purpose-built for that shift. We are not a layer that sits underneath Excel. We are a governed FP&A platform that pulls actuals and project planning directly from your ERP and, when you want it, pipeline data directly from your CRM. We run full pipeline pricing inside the platform. We maintain DCAA compliance throughout, embedded — alongside the cyber compliance posture your security team will ask about. We provide a repository for retaining defensible budget positions you can reproduce on demand and compare to actuals or to any other scenario. Excel is supported as an input option for the cases where you need to bring in something the ERP does not carry, but Excel is not the place where the model lives.
The center of gravity is unlimited scenario planning: understanding outcome options, seeing gaps, reacting in advance, modeling what happens to your indirect rates and your forward pricing if you lose a recompete, win an acquisition, take on a new program, or absorb an unexpected loss. The work that, in a workbook, is a multi-day reconciliation exercise becomes a question your team can answer in a session — and a question every relevant stakeholder can see the answer to.
The CFO Becomes the Conductor
This is the part I want CFOs to read most carefully. The promise is not that you give up the model you have built. The promise is that the judgment encoded in your model gets multiplied across the organization rather than concentrated in your inbox. The expertise that has lived in your workbook becomes the operating intelligence of your finance organization.
You stop being the keeper of the spreadsheet. You start being the leader who decides where the business should go next, with a team that can see what you see — and react in time to act on it.
If You Are Already a Decerio Customer, the Visibility Is Already Yours
This is not a new purchase decision. It is an adoption decision. The platform you have invested in is already capable of the visibility I am describing — and your Customer Success partner, working with your Controller and your team, can show you what it looks like on your real ERP and pipeline data. Not a migration. Not a pitch. A working session that puts the question on your real numbers: what does our scenario picture look like when it is not locked in a workbook, and what does my organization gain when it is not?
The decision is yours, as it should be. But there is a real cost to keeping the visibility concentrated, and it is not a gap any workbook — however disciplined — is designed to close.
What We Are Building
The next generation of enterprise platforms will not simply store information. They will help organizations operate with confidence — with a shared view of what is happening, what is likely to happen next, and where action is required before problems emerge. That is the future Decerio is building. It is one that respects every minute the CFO has spent perfecting their workbook, and it is one that makes the organization, not the workbook, the unit of intelligence.
