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Don't found a company unless you love Excel
- passwert 13y agoI started a company and I hate excel.
- ukandy 13y agoIt's doomed to fail in that case.
- collyw 13y agoI want to start a company or go freelance because I hate excel so much. My non technical co-workers insist on using it (for almost everything). I estimate around 80% of the problems with our system come from using Excel to upload data.
- einhverfr 13y agoI hate Excel too, just because of how many stupid things I have seen it do. I am not anti-spreadsheet btw.
- markyc 13y agosvbtle and medium: link-baiting so you don't have to
- simonbarker87 13y agoSame can be said for a PhD
- crntaylor 13y agoValid point - you eventually want your revenue to be larger than your expenses (unless you plan to get acqui-hired...) Invalid point - you need Excel to figure that out. I think a good hacker is more likely to use some combination of R, Python + Pandas, databases and CSV files to do most of their financial modelling. Then those all-important month-end reports can just be automated away...
- kfk 13y agoI work in finance, I toyed with Python and Pandas and CSV files for a while, it won't do. When you get at it, you soon realize that any kind of decision will have to come from high level numbers, no the billions of rows you hear on HN and, in that area, it makes simply no sense using anything other than Excel.
- maxerickson 13y agoPandas has all sorts of functionality for summarizing data. I can see sticking with the tool you know or preferring a pointy clicky interface, but you are implying the capability to generate those high level numbers is missing, and it isn't.
- Bsharp 13y agoJust because something can summarize data doesn't mean it's the best tool to use when trying to explain something. Executives and VC's with non-technical backgrounds might be intimidated by someone using relatively complex tools for what, to them, could be a basic spreadsheet on a platform they know how to use themselves. Excel's value comes mostly from the fact that everyone knows how to use it at some level, and the formulas are relatively easy to follow, so your audience knows they could probably reproduce and verify your work.
- xerophtye 13y agoValid Point: High-Ranked execs use it and usually try to translate everything into excel sheets. They would really appreciate seeing excel sheets in presentations. Invalid point: Formulae are easy to follow and audience can easily verify/reproduce your work. My friend, excel rocks when MAKING a spreadsheet, but it can be hellishly annoying to follow. when you got a long chain of formulae cells, it is very annoying to trace the data through it to see where it is coming form. Sure, a properly labelled Sheet takes care of it, but that's not usually the case. That's the main reason i am very excited about that excel-sheet visualization tool posted here the other day.
- walshemj 13y agoDO NOT use Excel to do your accounts on use a real accounting package! I say that as one of the factors in a VC company I worked for going bust was that they used some dodgy spreadsheet as part of it accounting system.
- smackfu 13y agoBad accounting can be done in any tool.
- einhverfr 13y agoIt's not the end of the world to do accounts in a spreadsheet. In fact for certain sorts of things, they are really ideal. However, it is a huge mistake to keep your general ledger or book of original entry in Excel. The reason has nothing to do with making mistakes or errors and every thing to do about fraud. Paper is the gold standard in anti-fraud accounting systems, particularly if you follow the standard rules like ensuring books are kept in pen. Paper to Excel is fine. Replacing the paper with Excel is not.
- daemon13 13y agoI would be curious to know for which sort of accounting things Excel is ideal? Sorry, I could not comprehend the second paragraph. Fraud has nothing to do with paper or computer based system. To minimize risk of fraud you need to implement proper sets of controls, like segregation of duties, etc. As for Excel - Excel is a poor instrument for doing the accounting, therefore it shall not be used ... unless you have some kind of micro/nano business.
- drill_sarge 13y agoDon't be a marketeer unless you love PowerPoint.
- cokernel 13y agoIf I'm starting a company, don't I want R and E to satisfy an inequality (and one in a particular direction) instead of an equation? More seriously, Excel has many problems that make it unsuitable for anything that might require statistical analysis. See for example B.D. McCullough and Berry Wilson, "On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2003," Comput. Statist. Data Anal. 49 (2005), no. 4, 1244--1252, available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.csda.2004.06.016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.csda.2004.06.016 but paywalled. I thought that this article, or a similar one, was recently discussed on HN, but I could not find an appropriate link. On the other hand, I don't know anything about business. I can see an argument for using a widely-deployed piece of software for verifying R > E even if it is inappropriate for data analysis.
- Bsharp 13y agoYou definitely don't want to be using Excel for heavy data analysis or statistical analysis, and unfortunately some companies refuse to acknowledge that. Performance is very often sacrificed for familiarity and ease-of-use in business.
- desas 13y ago> Performance is very often sacrificed for familiarity and ease-of-use in business. And practically everywhere else, that's why we're not writing web apps in assembler.
- collyw 13y agoActually I think developer time (and cost) is probably the main reason we aren't writing them in assembler.
- desas 13y agoQ. Why would assembler require more developer time? A. Because most developers aren't anywhere near familiar enough with assembler to do so and because ruby/python/php/etc are much much easier to use for developing a web app.
- noahmarc 13y agoSounds like a market opportunity. Aside from simple accounting (tracking revenue and expenses), what's the range of startup needs that are covered by Excel? If these needs aren't met by current accounting / finance packages, it definitely opens the door for a new competitor.
- AgLiAn 13y agoI am using Google Spreadsheet.
- pacofvf 13y agoThere is a thing called openoffice, or even better LibreOffice, there's almost nothing that you can do in Excel that you can't in LibreOffice
- mwexler 13y ago... for various definitions of "almost". Depending on your needs, Open/Libre may run circles around Excel, or fail laughably. Just like Emacs vs. Vi, Language1 vs. Language2, it all depends on your needs and available time.
- daemon13 13y agoI do not want to sound negative, but this post is complete water... What you need is: - understand your numbers, which requires knowledge, brain and a bit of experience; - accurate numbers, which shall be output by accounting. You can prepare P&L forecast for $50-100M business on one piece of paper, if needed. Excel just makes things more efficient.
- swombat 13y agoI've built GrantTree's financial modelling (real time, to the penny) using a Ruby/Rails back end and FreeAgent for the transaction management. No Excel in sight. The only thing we use Excel for is client calculations and holiday tracking.
- daemon13 13y agoWell, it is probably possible to do financial modelling in Erlang (fault tolerance, etc) or Go (good concurrency support). But why would you need this? You can do financial model in 1 hour using Excel...
- swombat 13y agoBecause it is far more clever than anything I could do in Excel. And it doesn't require me to duplicate information all over the place. I'd rather have just one master source of data that I do all the calculations on.
- PeterisP 13y agoIf you're doing deep analysis on large historical data, then it's in essence a MIS system, and most businesses do (and should do) that outside of Excel. But what the article is about, in a growing startup or a changing company (say, completely new product line) the 'one master source of data' is not in a database but the assumptions in your head; and any clever model based on your historical data will be either impossible or far more wrong than a simple order-of-magnitude calculation done on a paper napkin. And, well, Excel is more convenient than the napkin.
- kyllo 13y agoExcel spreadsheets are fantastic for one-time, throwaway calculations. If you want to save, share, or reuse anything, though, it's a one-way ticket to versioning hell, and you need to run scheduled reports off a database. Excel gets really dangerous when people who don't know anything about databases try to use it as a database.
- malandrew 13y agoObligatory link: http://wyorock.com/excelasadatabase.htm http://wyorock.com/excelasadatabase.htm
- eaigner 13y agocli script anyone? you obviously dont have to love excel...
- PeterisP 13y agoHow would you write and explore, say, a cash flow forecast of a not-yet-existing product line with a cli script? I could imagine doing that in emacs, maybe, because you can probably do everything there; or on plain paper if you're quick+accurate with doing math in your head.. but in a cli script ?
- linker3000 13y agoDon't found a company unless you understand basic business concepts and maintain an accurate audit trail of your financial operations (or use/employ someone who does) - sure. Using Excel? Maybe, but it's not the only option so the original article is way off the mark being so specific. It's akin to saying "if you want to make a telephone call, use an iPhone". Anyway, based on my current employer, spreadsheets are for: Holiday rotas Support call logs / case management Weekly status reporting (because the format I was using in Word was so tabular 'it might as well be done in a spreadsheet' - go figure!) Project Management (Make a GANTT chart by colouring in various width/Joined cells) and then spend ages manually adjusting things when dependencies slip. Manually copying/pasting data from an on-screen query so it can be sorted and deduped before being put into an email. I have now automated the whole process.
- serichsen 13y agoI would never use a spreadsheet for basing decisions on. It is just too error prone. I do not know how many trillions of euros (and dollars) have been wasted due to some excel sheets having off-by-one errors in marking rows or similar issues.
- malandrew 13y agoHas anyone here ever done their startup's financial modeling in code instead? And if so, can you share your code sans your real data and assumptions.