Spreadsheet risk. How worried should we be?
The risk of error in the misuse of Excel spreadsheets has been widely reported, with recent high profile mistakes hitting the headlines. Many of us who rely on Excel to do our work are thinking, ‘there but for the grace of God go I…..’ So how worried should we be? The good news is that […]
Openbox release notes: December update v0.8.21
Since the end of the Openbox beta round 3 in October, we’ve been hard at work fixing the issues our beta users have found and implementing their feature requests. Here is the complete list to date. New features Create LAMBDAs from Openbox calculations. Read LAMBDAs from Excel and convert to Openbox calculations. “Unfold” recursive LAMBDAs […]
What does Lambda mean?
Those of you, like me, who follow Excel on social media (do your children take the p*** for this the way mine do?) may have seen a new article this week. Microsoft has announced a new feature in Excel called Lambda (λ). Lambda matters a lot. Both because of what it allows Excel to do, […]
The Multi-Billion Dollar Excel Error that didn’t happen today
Excel is involved in every major transaction, every capital investment, every business sale, large or small and most financial forecasts. Decisions worth billions of dollars every single day are based on Excel models. Recent weeks have seen multiple headlines about Excel errors. Excel has been blamed for major losses, and in the case of UK […]
Harder, Better, Faster
A Faster Audit? We set ourselves the challenge of looking at the financial model audit process to see how we can make it faster for our clients. For those of you un-familiar with the typical audit process, it usually goes something like this: Engage auditors around 1 month prior to bid / financial close Initial […]
The Beginning of the end? U.K. PFI contract expiry
When I was setting out in PPP / PFI as a fresh young analyst, the idea that these 20+ year deals would one day reach contract expiry seemed an unimaginably far-off prospect. However, as I survey my many grey hairs in the mirror, that time is now upon us and there are interesting times ahead […]