Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs

Tatyana Shumsky:

Adobe Inc.’s . finance chief Mark Garrett says his team struggles keeping track of which jobs have been filled at the software company.

The process can take days and requires finance staff to pull data from disparate systems that house financial and human-resources information into Microsoft Corp.’s Excel spreadsheets. From there they can see which groups are hiring and how salary spending affects the budget.

“I don’t want financial planning people spending their time importing and exporting and manipulating data, I want them to focus on what is the data telling us,” Mr. Garrett said. He is working on cutting Excel out of this process, he said