I'll answer the part about Excel. A lot of company finance depts shuffle Excel files back and forth via e-mail and shares, and merging out-of-sync data becomes

I'll answer the part about Excel. A lot of company finance depts shuffle Excel files back and forth via e-mail and shares, and merging out-of-sync data becomes an issue. You would be surprised how many finance departments of large companies still do this in a Mickey Mouse fashion. There are enterprise products that address this, like Cognos Planning, Hyperion (not sure of the specific product name), Cognos TM1, Jedox Palo. But they are expensive (5 figures and up) for licensing and expensive for customization (>150/h consultants). Not so expensive that you wouldn't get ROI from the wasted person-hours, but the sticker shock is there, and in the case of the Cognos products, the usability leaves a lot to be desired. I'm not sure that Hypernumbers can match the functionality of the enterprise products I mention above (today at least), but for the modest to light use cases, it seems to be satisfactory.