Top 10 Spreadsheet Nightmares

Top 10 Spreadsheet Nightmares

1) You have to maintain one spreadsheet per sales rep and pretty soon you have a nightmare of tens or hundreds of individual spreadsheets that you have maintain by hand.

2) You created the perfect commission spreadsheet for each of your salespeople to be paid every two weeks. Later you realize you have to create summary reports by month. Now trying to reorganize the data on a monthly basis is a nightmare.

3) When you are adding new transactions for payment, you copy over transactions and change only the dates and amounts. You copy the transaction but forget to change the amount.

4) You add new transactions for calculating commissions, but unfortunately the @ Sum expression does not include these new additional rows. Salesrep’s commissions are wrong again.

5) Certain rows and columns of your spreadsheet are hidden in your spreadsheet so that others don’t have to view them. But these hidden cells provide important values such as rates for further calculations. Accidentally while you are copying and pasting values, you pasted right onto these hidden cells. And you don’t even know where the error is now.

6) You create a spreadsheet with transactions for every period and link the individual commission statement spreadsheets to the common spreadsheet. In the next period, you forget to update the link for one or two of the commission statement spreadsheets.

7) Your colleagues also need to modify the spreadsheet, and you make a copy for them. Pretty soon you have many different versions of the truth floating around.

8) The person that set up all the commission spreadsheets and does the calculations leaves the firm. Now the sales commissions are due and you cannot figure out how to change the spreadsheets to produce them.

9) The salesrep is sitting in front of your desk. After noticing an error in the current sales commission statement, he has gone back and checked his previous statements and found errors in most of them, where he has been paid less. Now he wants to know why you have been taking his money away.

10) A few of your salesreps quit. Now you get a legal letter saying that you are being sued for fraud for not paying your sales reps their due commissions.