Replacing this excel sheet with a 'proper' system would cost between $5million and $20million probably, depending on what sort of consultancy delivered it
And would be inflexible, and maybe still wrong, and not necessarily more transparent... So it may mean several extra million dollars per year in ongoing maintenance if things turn out typically...
Excel has many issues, but the cost of replacing it is surprisingly high.
>And would be inflexible, and maybe still wrong, and not necessarily more transparent...
I'm going through this right now. Not anywhere in this scale, but just in terms of deciding whether to move an order-tracking/accounting system I've built in Excel to a "real" database.
The database I am considering (Panorama X for Mac) is quite inexpensive, I've heard very good things about it, and has a spreadsheet-like UI. However, I've used Excel enough to know that I haven't tapped more than a small fraction of its ability, especially things like Power Query. As much as I loathe VBA, what if the cost of moving to a "real" database isn't the up-front cost, but the longer-term inflexibility of Panorama (and, pretty much, anything else in my price range) compared to the beast that is Excel?
