Well in these situations, the implicit ask of your company (I've been there myself) is to basically rebuild excel but replace some of the power/flexibility of

Well in these situations, the implicit ask of your company (I've been there myself) is to basically rebuild excel but replace some of the power/flexibility of excel for safety and to remove the risk of error away from front end users (aka move the risk to the back end developers) Unfortunately which specific features of Excel are acceptable to remove are unknown until you have already way over invested into the project. The best I've seen this done is having Excel as a client for your data store. Where read access is straightforward and write can be done via csv upload (and heavy validation and maybe history rollback). That way the business can self-service every permutation of dashboard/report they need and only when a very specific usecase arises do you need to start putting engineering effort behind it. I suppose you can also supplement the Excel workflow with a pared down CRUD interface for the inevitable employee allergic to excel.