=== A lot of accountants make a glorious, tragic mess of Excel. I've seen it -- over and over and over, again. But the big systems are seldom a solution, in goo

=== A lot of accountants make a glorious, tragic mess of Excel. I've seen it -- over and over and over, again. But the big systems are seldom a solution, in good part because rather than looking at those people's problems, they impose a top-down methodology that nobody really wants and that makes a lot of work in and of its own nature. Feed the beast, rather than taming it. === And in fact the point is more on a substitution/integration of spreadsheets, than a shiny new system. To be fair, I understand all what you say. I just disagree a bit on the new systems. I use SAP, cognos and hyperion and they suck not because they are new or badly implemented, but because they are closed and the csv they output is amazingly horrible. Also, those tools don't seem to have a decent api accessible from decent programming languages, so welcome clicking hell and goodbye automation. If those tools where open source, at least you could hope in some kind of improvement or at least integration with your own way of working. --- On the carrier side. Let's just say I don't do this for the carrier (I would like to consult on this things and leave corporate job). But automating, even at a simple level, tends to improve my output and reduce error, which is a huge advantage over the other employees that have to stay late because their look ups formulas are too heavy and files take 10 min to save or 'calculate' stuff.