Admit it: You love a good spreadsheet.

No judgment here, we do, too. There’s just so much they can do! And we don’t just mean the business side of things. One of us has been known to use spreadsheets to instantly alphabetize their movie collection. (Hey, what did we say about not judging?) Another colleague uses a spreadsheet to inventory their pantry and do meal planning. Still another uses Excel to create custom patterns for crafts.

Point is, we use Excel spreadsheets for all manner of things. Kelly Rowland even famously “texts” Nelly in Excel in her “Dilemma” music video. (We don’t suggest doing that, for the record.)

Jokes aside, everyone loves a good spreadsheet and there’s a reason for that. Lots of reasons, actually.  After all, spreadsheets can do powerful calculations, they’re flexible, and to top it off, they’re widely available. Spreadsheets let you play around with your numbers, presentations, formulas, and graphs. And, spreadsheets are one of the most enduring tools in the business that allows users to rapidly model business decisions into financial outcomes. 

Consider these fun facts from a recent survey on how much people use spreadsheets: 

• On average, people look at a spreadsheet every 16 minutes
• Employees have 2.6 spreadsheets open on their computer at any given time
• 38% of an employee’s day is spent working in a spreadsheet.

Spreadsheets have been around for more than three decades, and they’re not going away anytime soon. Those who work with data every day continually crave the flexibility and familiarity of a spreadsheet. 

Many of our customers love their spreadsheets, too. Let’s take a look.

MAC Wholesale

MAC Wholesale knew NetSuite would be the ideal ERP for their business. They also simultaneously needed to implement a solution to help make managing their purchase and sales orders more efficient, because they were SKU-intensive and very lengthy. They really wanted to be able to keep working in Excel, but knew that in order to upload data to NetSuite, they would need a tool that would make the process more efficient and effective. 

Jack Lingo Asset Management

Due to the nature of JLAM’s setup, their controller must work not only with NetSuite data for reporting, but also with multiple outside systems that handle property-level financials. Any attempts at centralizing reporting in NetSuite involve multiple data imports that were first entered into Excel templates and then uploaded natively into NetSuite via CSV imports. The time-consuming nature of the process was further extended due to the need to adapt Excel data exported in a legacy format, which necessitated additional adjustments for compatibility purposes. 

MacKenzie-Childs

Managing omnichannel sales across catalog, ecommerce, home shopping channels, major department store retailers, third-party resellers, and their own international flagship and independent retail stores, MacKenzie-Childs needed to consolidate reporting and transform its decision-making process with data-driven insights. Liz Rozwood, Chief of Staff for MacKenzie-Childs, helped spearhead this transformation through the implementation of NetSuite, but quickly realized that their reporting needs were more complex than NetSuite’s native tools could manage. This resulted in an intensely manual process using Excel templates that took up 20 hours per week and, for the success of the company, was ultimately unsustainable.

Loving Excel A Little More

All three of these are perfect examples of a bit of a love/hate relationship these organizations had with Excel. Spreadsheets met their needs, but the process was intensely manual and time-consuming. Each wondered if there was a way to make that spreadsheet work just a little better for them—not to abandon Excel altogether, but work where they loved working, only more efficiently. 

The answer, of course, is YES! All three of these organizations had the good fortune to come across ExtendInsights, whether at a SuiteWorld conference or through word of mouth from other happy users. And all three achieved profound improvements on their spreadsheet reporting with direct Excel to NetSuite integration through ExtendInsights. 

“CloudExtend makes it so we’re not wasting 20 hours a week copying and pasting,” said Liz Rozwood, Chief of Staff at MacKenzie-Childs. “Instead we’ve freed up to 1,000 hours a year for new analysis and driving the business forward.” (Read the full story here!) 

JLAM saw similar efficiency improvements. As controller Ian Goodenough shared, “Utilizing ExtendInsights has refined the import process, reducing the time from one minute . . . to a swift 10 seconds. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re importing a lot of different data from other places, it adds up to a lot.” (Read the full story here!) 

Matt Miller, COO and President at MAC Wholesale, agreed. “With ExtendInsights, we’ve taken a process that could take up to 30 minutes and made it pretty much instant. With just one person’s position, we have saved them a minimum of 10 hours a week.” (Read the full story here!)

Show Your Spreadsheets Some Love with ExtendInsights

We’d never ask you to leave your spreadsheets behind. So instead of asking you to break up with your spreadsheet, we’re here to make them that much easier to love. And that starts with seamlessly integrating data from popular sources such as NetSuite, Salesforce, HubSpot, Chargebee, and Stripe right into Excel so you can instantly report on to-the-moment data. Refresh data automatically on a schedule, or on-demand with a single click. Be confident that you’re always able to access the most recent information to make the best business decisions possible. 

Not to mention data writeback functionality available for sources like NetSuite and Salesforce. Say bye-bye to time-consuming CSV imports and upload directly from—you guessed it—your beloved spreadsheet. 

At the end of the day, you want to reply on the power of your spreadsheets to support your business, so you also need to be able to trust the data in those spreadsheets. You can do that with ExtendInsights. So go ahead, open up a new spreadsheet (we see that smile!) and let’s get you started.