Paul Barnhurst on why Excel-based commission systems fail. Nearly 70% of companies run commissions in Excel, and about 70% admit to errors on each run. Automating a broken process just scales the mistakes.
Nearly 70%.
About two thirds (nearly 70%).
Paul Barnhurst.
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Challenge with a lot of really smarty pants finance people who are good with Excel is that you feel like you can take on the world. You feel like you can build software basically in Excel. And to some extent, one would argue, you can. When it comes to something like commissions, where nearly 70% of companies who run commissions do it in Excel, I would say not unrelated, about Two thirds, nearly 70% of companies admit to having errors on any given commission run. You got to wonder, are you using the right tools tool for the job? And finance people will retreat the spreadsheet even if there's challenges. It's like you get stuck in the sock and that's just how you do things. And then you go out and you look at tools. If you have a system that's actually somewhat streamlined, you don't want to automate bad processes.
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