The narrative around Excel in finance has become predictable: AI will replace it, Gen Z rejects it, and new platforms have rendered it obsolete. But what do finance professionals actually think?
We surveyed 212 finance professionals across the US and UK to find out. The results challenge nearly every assumption about Excel’s role in modern finance.
Excel for Finance isn’t Going Anywhere (and Finance Professionals Know it)
Microsoft Excel is still essential, with 89% of companies’ financial processes running on the 40-year-old program. These aren’t processes that simply touch Excel occasionally or use it as one tool among many. Excel powers the core workflows that keep finance departments running.
When we asked respondents to name their favorite business software, 40% chose Excel, pulling far ahead of ERP systems (26%), FP&A platforms (17%), or PowerPoint (9%). Among accountants specifically, that number jumped to 57%.
But here’s the surprise. Gen Z and Millennial finance professionals are far bigger fans of Excel than Gen X and Boomers.
54% of 22-32-year-olds in the CFO’s Office say they love Excel, compared to just 39% for both 33-50-year-olds and those older than 51.
And that love comes from experience. 83% of younger users spend more than five hours each day in the spreadsheet, falling to only around 70% for older cohorts.
In fact, more than one in four (27%) of 22-32-year-olds spend more than seven hours a day in Excel. It essentially occupies their entire workday.
A full 84% believe Excel will remain as important or become more important over the next decade, with only 15% predicting a decline. Gen Z and Millennial finance professionals align strongly with this view: 89% say Excel will maintain or grow its importance in the years ahead.
In fact, 78% of younger pros would either decline a job that banned Excel or accept it only grudgingly.
Read the full survey report here.
Why Excel Dominates: The Finance Professionals’ Perspective
The survey reveals exactly why Excel is the dominant software force in finance:
1. Universal Adoption Creates Network Effects: When 89% of financial processes touch Excel, opting out isn’t realistic. Teams need Excel fluency to collaborate with colleagues, read inherited models, and communicate with stakeholders.
2. Flexibility Beats Rigidity: Purpose-built FP&A platforms that require finance professionals to abandon Excel offer structure but limit customization. Excel lets people build exactly what their business needs, rather than what a software vendor dictates.
3. Career Currency: Excel proficiency remains the most valued technical skill in finance, with 90% of finance professionals across all generations crediting it as a significant or moderate contributor to career advancement. Controllers and accountants report the strongest connection between Excel knowledge and career progression. It’s the tool that proves you understand finance deeply.
4. Speed to Value: Teams can build solutions in Excel immediately rather than waiting for IT implementation cycles, vendor customization, or training programs.
So everything in the garden is rosy? Well, mostly…
The Love/Hate Excel Paradox for Finance Teams
When we asked finance professionals to describe their relationship with Excel, 82% reported high or moderate emotional attachment. But here’s where it gets interesting:
43% describe the relationship as “love/hate,” calling it essential and reliable yet also frustrating and manual.
Only 12% say they outright hate Excel. Despite all the pain points, the overwhelming majority recognize Excel’s irreplaceable value.
What they love about Excel:
- Flexibility to build exactly what they need
- Universal language across finance teams
- Canvas for implementing creative solutions
- Core to their professional identity
What drives them crazy:
- 28% cite data consolidation as their biggest frustration
- 23% struggle with data entry and updates
- 22% point to version control and tracking changes
- 14% face collaboration challenges
The contradiction reveals something important: finance teams don’t want to eliminate Excel. They want to eliminate Excel’s limitations, especially meticulous manual work.
The Hidden Time Sink: Excel Error-hunting
The downside of Excel dependence is error management. Nearly every respondent (99%) has discovered a material Excel error in their team’s work before it was shared externally.
81% of those surveyed spend six hours or more each month hunting down and fixing Excel errors. For teams at companies with 1,000+ employees, that number increases significantly. At the high end, teams lose 10+ hours monthly to error resolution, equivalent to one and a half full workdays. And that’s during normal periods.
Peak Period Pain: The Excel Burnout Cycle
During month-end close and budget season, Excel’s limitations create real human costs:
- 68% experience increased stress or anxiety
- 65% work weekends regularly
- 56% miss family or personal events
- 33% report difficulty sleeping or insomnia
These numbers increase with seniority and age. Those in their thirties, forties, and fifties (as well as treasurers) report the highest rates of peak-period stress. The patterns suggest that as people advance in their careers and take on more complex Excel-based workflows, the pressure intensifies.
This isn’t sustainable and finance teams know it. Yet they continue showing up at the spreadsheet because the alternative (not using Excel) would be worse.
But is there a way to overcome Excel’s core limitation?
The Consolidation Crisis: Excel’s Biggest Problem
While finance professionals cite multiple frustrations with Excel, data consolidation emerges as the leading challenge, especially for specific roles.
40% of FP&A professionals name consolidation as their single biggest frustration, higher than any other role. This makes sense: FP&A teams routinely gather data from dozens of Excel files across departments, reconcile versions, and aggregate numbers into management reports.
Controllers and accountants, meanwhile, point more frequently to manual data entry (30% and 29% respectively). Their workflows involve more transaction processing and journal entries, work that feels particularly tedious in Excel.
Treasurers face a unique challenge: ranking consolidation, version control, and error hunting as equally frustrating problems. Treasury’s need to track cash positions, forecast liquidity, and manage risk across multiple entities makes Excel’s single-user, file-based architecture particularly painful.
Again, the consolidation problem is compounded during peak periods. Survey respondents estimate 51-75% of their company’s financial processes involve Excel. When those processes depend on spreadsheets scattered across shared drives, email attachments, and individual desktops, bringing everything together for month-end close becomes the nightmare scenario that drives weekend work and compounds stress.
What Finance Professionals Actually Want
The survey data suggests that finance professionals aren’t asking for an Excel replacement. They’re asking for Excel evolution.
They want:
- Automated data consolidation while keeping Excel’s interface
- Version control and collaboration without abandoning spreadsheet flexibility
- Error detection and prevention that doesn’t require leaving their preferred environment
- Preserved formulas and models they’ve built over the years
This explains why Excel-native platforms resonate with finance teams while standalone FP&A tools face adoption resistance. Finance professionals don’t want to choose between Excel’s flexibility and modern platform capabilities. They want both.
The Path Forward: Excel Extra
As AI transforms finance and new tools emerge, finance professionals are sending a clear message: they’re not leaving Excel behind.
The question isn’t “Excel vs. modern platforms.” It’s “Excel plus modern capabilities.”
- Keep the spreadsheet interface finance professionals know and love
- Add automated data consolidation across files and systems
- Build in version control and audit trails
- Layer on error detection without forcing formula changes
- Enable collaboration while preserving individual control
These are precisely the capabilities that make Datarails the solution of choice for thousands of finance leaders around the world. Even Diarmuid Early, the Microsoft Excel World Champion, wears our shirt!
See the solution for yourself.
