The Hidden Cost of Spreadsheets and Point Solutions

Today, mid-market organizations have the burden of growing quickly while having fewer resources than their larger peers. The finance function at these companies is often expanding beyond balancing the books into strategy. For many, the status quo ushered in growth from the beginning stages of the organization, which feels comfortable.

Unfortunately, though, that comfort often hides what’s really hamstringing the organization from growing more efficiently: legacy systems — namely spreadsheets and point solutions. These tools might seem familiar and cost-effective, but they carry hidden pitfalls that can quietly erode efficiency, accuracy, and agility.

How do these tools sneakily leak into your finance systems? This blog explores how manual work and fragmented systems corrode what should be a humming organization, and asks if you’re ready to make a change.

The Misleading Shroud of Spreadsheet Comfort

Spreadsheets are the Swiss army knife of finance. They’re flexible, accessible, and nearly universal. For many mid-market organizations, spreadsheets are the default tool for budgeting, forecasting, and planning. But as companies grow, the cracks begin to show.

Time Lost to Manual Labor

Finance professionals spend almost three-quarters of their time (70%) gathering and validating data rather than analyzing it. Those efforts waste time, money, and talent that could be dedicated to high-value strategic planning and execution.

Errors and Risk Exposure

Spreadsheets are deceptively simple. And dangerously unreliable.

Take a simple copy-paste error, a broken formula, or a typo. While easily found at any organization, those mistakes are painfully human, cascade through reports, and lead to costly mistakes.

Point solutions are no better. They often lack seamless integration, which means lots of manual work that increases the risk of errors.

And those mistakes don’t just erode financial accuracy. They could also jeopardize compliance and even customer trust.

Low Visibility and Collaboration

Ever suffered through files that end with something like -_V4_Final_FINAL_V5? Spreadsheets and isolated apps are often the culprits, creating silos and nightmare version control issues.

The problem with this issue is that it creates limited real-time visibility. As a result, cross-functional work suffers. Strategic decisions also can’t be made with confidence that you’re working with the latest data or that it’s been communicated to the right people.

Scalability Problems

Spreadsheets and point solutions are excellent quick fixers for small organizations. Why? These legacy tools are cheap and address single-point problems that strain growing companies. Unfortunately, however, the tools also transform into liabilities as organizations expand.

Spreadsheets struggle with large data sets. Point solutions proliferate across departments, creating a patchwork of tools that’s costly to maintain and difficult to scale.

The result? A fractured technology landscape that slows growth and innovation.

Lost Opportunity Cost

When bogged down by manual processes and incompatible tools, teams can’t focus on higher-value activities like forecasting, scenario planning, or innovation. Reliance on outdated tools stunts organizational agility and growth — perhaps the greatest hidden cost of all.

The Patchwork Problem: Point Solutions

Point solutions are popular for a reason: They solve specific pain points like consolidation, reporting, or planning. But when each department adopts its own tools, vendor sprawl and painful integration headaches await. And the outcome isn’t pretty: a brittle, expensive ecosystem that’s hard to secure and difficult to change.

Technical Debt and Integration Risk

With a bunch of different point solutions in place, it’s no wonder that they drive data duplication, conflicting definitions, and endless reconciliation efforts. The burden to fix these issues falls on IT teams, who must expend resources to stitch together systems — creating integration risks and technical debt. As regulatory, cyber, and market pressures mount, these risks become untenable.

Governance and Security Challenges

Another issue with point solutions is their often paper-thin governance and security controls. While a unified platform can enforce policies, trace data lineage, and ensure compliance, a patchwork system of point solutions really can’t. This failure of diligence exposes organizations to audit failures and security breaches.

Real-World Impact: Stories from the Field

Consider the experience of Cordis, a high-tech medical device company. Its director of financial planning and analysis (FP&A) spent years battling an outdated Excel-based system. It was time-intensive, crash-prone, and error-ridden. After moving to a unified platform, the team saw significant efficiency and accuracy gains, freeing up time for value-added analysis and improving responsiveness to stakeholders.

At Jack Doheny Company, budgeting was an annual ordeal because the company’s Excel-based system couldn’t handle the complexity of monthly reporting across 16 branches. Transitioning to a modern solution enabled granular asset-level planning and drove exponential revenue growth.

Stake Center Locating, operating in 48 states, struggled to forecast workload and resource allocation due to regulatory complexity. By adopting AI-powered forecasting, the company dramatically improved accuracy and agility, incorporating factors like weather and state-specific nuances.

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) Perspective: Why IT Matters

While the finance team feels the pain of spreadsheets and point solutions daily, CIOs play a crucial role in enabling transformation. The old pattern — standing up point solutions and stitching them together — is giving way to an enterprise platform approach. CIOs now go beyond the traditional remit, tasked with eliminating fragmentation, enforcing governance, and accelerating the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) without creating shadow IT.

A unified platform offers fewer moving parts, simpler procurement, and consistent governance. Such platforms integrate once with core systems (ERP, HCM, CRM, BI), support scalability and cloud flexibility, and embed security and compliance controls. Most importantly, a unified platform empowers finance to move from reactive to strategic business drivers.

What’s Next? Your Path to Smarter Finance

Modernizing finance is about enabling your team to focus on what matters: driving strategy, improving accuracy, and scaling for growth. The right solution can transform your finance team from data wranglers to strategic leaders.

Ready to explore what’s possible? Start by reading Scaling Smarter: A Mid-Market CFO’s Guide for a deeper dive into the challenges and opportunities facing mid-market finance leaders. For more resources and real-world success stories, visit onestream.com.