Related papers: Spreadsheets and Long Term Corporate Survival
The paper examines in the context of financial reporting, the controls that organisations have in place to manage spreadsheet risk and errors. There has been widespread research conducted in this area, both in Ireland and internationally.…
Spreadsheets are used extensively within today's organisations. Although spreadsheets have many benefits, they can also present a significant risk exposure, requiring appropriate management. Protiviti has worked with a number of…
Past studies show that only a small percent of organizations implement and enforce formal rules or informal guidelines for the designing, testing, documenting, using, modifying, sharing and archiving of spreadsheet models. Due to lack of…
Spreadsheets are widely used in industry, because they are flexible and easy to use. Often, they are even used for business-critical applications. It is however difficult for spreadsheet users to correctly assess the maintainability of…
A common application of spreadsheets is the development of models that deliver projections of the future financial statements of companies established to pursue ventures that are subject to project financing. A survey of 11 such…
There has been a significant amount of research into spreadsheets over the last two decades. Errors in spreadsheets are well documented. Once used mainly for simple functions such as logging, tracking and totalling information, spreadsheets…
We developed an internet-based questionnaire on spreadsheet use that we administered to a large number of users in several companies and organizations to document how spreadsheets are currently being developed and used in business. In this…
Heavy use of spreadsheets by organisations bears many potential risks such as errors, ambiguity, data loss, duplication, and fraud. In this paper these risks are briefly outlined along with their available mitigation methods such as:…
The use of spreadsheets is widespread. Be it in business, finance, engineering or other areas, spreadsheets are created for their flexibility and ease to quickly model a problem. Very often they evolve from simple prototypes to…
This paper explores the impacts of spreadsheets on business operations in a water utility parastatal in Malawi, Sub-Saharan Africa. The organisation is a typical example of a semi-government body operating in a technologically…
Spreadsheets have been with us in their present form for over a quarter of a century. We have become so used to them that we forget that we are using them at all. It may serve us well to stand back for a moment to review where, when and how…
The first fully-documented study into the quantitative impact of errors in operational spreadsheets identified an interesting anomaly. One of the five participating organisations involved in the study contributed a set of five spreadsheets…
Spreadsheets are widely used, and studies have shown that most end-user spreadsheets contain nontrivial errors. To improve end-users productivity, recent research proposes the use of a model-driven engineering approach to spreadsheets. In…
We present a pragmatic method for management of risks that arise due to spreadsheet use in large organizations. We combine peer-review, tool-assisted evaluation and other pre-existing approaches into a single organization-wide approach that…
Spreadsheets are software programs which are typically created by end-users and often used for business-critical tasks. Many studies indicate that errors in spreadsheets are very common. Thus, a number of vendors offer auditing tools which…
Fifteen years of research studies have concluded unanimously that spreadsheet errors are both common and non-trivial. Now we must seek ways to reduce spreadsheet errors. Several approaches have been suggested, some of which are promising…
There have been many articles and mishaps published about the risks of uncontrolled spreadsheets in today's business environment, including non-compliance, operational risk, errors, and fraud all leading to significant loss events.…
Recognizing that the use of spreadsheets within finance will likely not subside in the near future, this paper discusses a major barrier that is preventing more organizations from adopting enterprise spreadsheet management programs. But…
Spreadsheets are ubiquitous, heavily relied on throughout vast swathes of finance, commerce, industry, academia and Government. They are also acknowledged to be extraordinarily and unacceptably prone to error. If these two points are…
Spreadsheets are widely used within companies and often form the basis for business decisions. Numerous cases are known where incorrect information in spreadsheets has lead to incorrect decisions. Such cases underline the relevance of…