Why it’s time to move beyond Excel to Vareto, the next-gen FP&A software platform

Increase accuracy and consistency. Vareto automates many manual FP&A tasks, which can help to reduce errors and improve the accuracy and consistency of financial data and reports. Rather than relying on manual CSV pulls from siloed systems and uploads, finance teams can leverage Vareto's integrations with ERP, CRM, HRIS, and other tools to pipe data directly in and serve as the main source of truth for operational and financial data. In contrast, Excel is prone to errors and inconsistencies, especially when used by multiple team members who may be working on the same data.

‍Scale productivity. Vareto can automate many of the routine tasks involved in reporting, planning, and forecasting, which can free up time for finance teams to focus on more strategic initiatives. For example, instead of manually building budget versus actuals variance reports in Excel, finance teams can set up dynamic tables that bring in the latest ERP data and automatically roll forward time periods to compare the latest actual spend to plan. 

‍Improve collaboration. Vareto can increase transparency and create trust between finance teams and business stakeholders. For example, finance teams often have to break down large models into discrete sheets to share information with and gather inputs from different business departments. After gathering budget inputs, finance teams then need to get that data back into their original model — a very painful, tedious process. There’s the unnecessary pain of manually managing version control and reconciling different versions to make sure nothing is missed. Questions and comments from team members and business stakeholders are triaged via email or chat, which results in lost context. This disconnect can be frustrating across the business. Vareto reduces the friction of this process with nuanced sharing permissions (by report or tab), support for up to 100 concurrent users in reports and models, real-time commenting and @mention tagging, and spot annotations to give more color. In addition, Vareto's interface is intuitive and easy to use, so adoption and consistent usage go beyond just the finance power user.

‍Empower better, more agile decision-making. Vareto gives finance teams real-time access to financial data and insights for informed decision-making, including composite metrics stitched together from different business systems. For example, because Vareto can pull in vendor spend data from your ERP and customer data from your CRM, it’s possible to get data on real-time CAC and optimize marketing spend accordingly. Vareto also offers advanced analytics and modeling capabilities, which provide real-time insights to adapt quickly to changes in the market. In contrast, Excel is static, limited in its ability to incorporate real-time data, and has limited advanced analytics capabilities.

Excel has served its purpose and will continue to serve some use cases, but the time has come for finance users to move beyond Excel and embrace a modern FP&A software solution like Vareto. With the ability to handle large amounts of data with ease, robust collaboration and automation functionality, and advanced planning capabilities, Vareto's modern FP&A software solution is the future of finance. It’s time for finance users to move beyond a tool that’s been around for 35+ years and take their financial analysis to the next level.