Excerpt from the actual review document (Health NZ Financial Management Review, [0]):<p><i>Notably, one major issue was through a significant reliance on the use of an Excel file to manage the consolidated financials of the organisation. This spreadsheet was the primary data file used by HNZ to manage its financial performance. It consolidated files from each district into a single spreadsheet, and key reports, such as the monthly finance report, were produced from it. The use of an Excel spreadsheet file to track and report financial performance for a $28bn expenditure organisation raises significant concerns, particularly when other more appropriate systems are present on the IT landscape.<p>This Excel file is flawed in that:<p>• Financial information was often 'hard-coded,' making it difficult to trace to
the source or have updated data flow through.<p>• Errors such as incorrectly releasing accruals or double-up releases were not
picked up until following periods.<p>• Changes to prior periods and FTE errors in district financial reporting Excel
submissions, would not flow through to consolidated file.<p>• The spreadsheet can be easy to manipulate information as there is limited
tracking to source information where information is not flowing directly from
accounting systems.<p>• It is highly prone to human error, such as accidental typing of a number or
omission of a zero.</i><p>--<p>[0] <a href="https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/HNZ-Financial-Review-Report.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/HNZ-Financial-...</a>
The amount of issues I have seen in the last ~20 years caused by "off by one" type of errors in Excel is insane.<p>Few examples:<p>- incorrect schedule for the electricity grid for an entire country<p>- incorrect assessment of an airport use for an airline (causing few millions USD loss in revenue)<p>- incorrect financial position assessment for a mine (resulting incorrect deciosion to optimize the wrong business process, not sure about how much they lost)<p>Making illegal states unrepresentable is a concept that benefits programming langues and business processes alike.
> The spreadsheet-using agency is Health New Zealand (HNZ) which was established in 2022 to replace 20 district health boards in the expectation it would be more cost-effective and deliver more consistent services.<p>Austria did the same with their national health insurance, to reduce costs and organisational overhead. It massively increased costs and organisational overhead.
The world runs on Excel. Contrary to popular belief that ERPs and what not is what companies use. Big companies use Excel to verify the ERP data and reports.<p>There was an article shared here on HN sometime in the middle of last year that broke down how versatile Excel is and how different companies are trying to steal just a niche use of Excel (I remember reading about Airtable doing the automation bit much easier than in Excel, some company doing charts easier than Excel and so on). I wish I could find it again.
I've seen several multi billions companies running big processes in Excel. No automation, just put more human workers on the spreadsheets.<p>I understand the decision though, because investing in a IT system is so friggin expensive, require 10x more people and there is a huge lack of talent to deliver something on time, that works, and actually saves money.
This makes me think of a system that just got replaced where I work - multiple hundreds of temporary workers being tracked through their setup and onboarding processes through one massive Excel spreadsheet, saved on a shared Teams group that everyone edited at once. It was held together with prayers, fickle filters, custom views and loose validation rules and I hated it the whole time it was active. We'd frequently have to make sure to remove rows from it and put them in an archive spreadsheet to keep the main one performant enough to function - but that split made it difficult to sift through data when someone had an issue. Not to mention that records routinely went missing or got overlooked.<p>It's now a SharePoint database - I don't know what I think of that, but at least it was built for the job and has some solid integrations with other systems in it that make life easier.
Not surprised...I am implementing ERP system for 20 years now and Excel is the most popular ERP system :(<p>Related story when NHS England copied-pasted stuff for COVID stats but most of the data got lost because they are using an old version and there was a 65k line limit...
Perhaps this is telling us that the financial losses and inefficiencies incurred from these supposedly error-prone processes are small enough (relative speaking at least most of the time) that there’s no real consequences to the stakeholders (politicians or bureaucrats in this instance) or the survival of the organisation (this org isn’t for-profit after all). So from the stakeholders’ POV it just doesn’t justify putting the investment upfront into proper software systems. Without greater accountability and real stake in the org from the politicians and bureaucrats, headlines like this will continue to appear in the decades to come.
> The report found “monthly financial reporting usually took 12-15 days to consolidate and five days to analyse.”<p>> It gets worse: Health Minister Simeon Brown last week delivered a speech in which he said HNZ operates “an estimated 6,000 applications and 100 digital networks” – or roughly one application for every 16 staff members.<p>> He also said HNZ’s Senior Leadership Team members “have only just begun weekly in-person meetings, and have continued to operate from different offices, despite the majority living in Auckland and the organization being two and a half years old.” Most work in different buildings.<p>> However the Minister doesn’t have a plan to get off Excel, or fix HNZ’s tech leadership woes.<p>HNZ's Senior Leadership should be reassigned to clearing fatbergs from sewer mains, and some competent grownups brought in.<p>And probably similar, further up in the NZ government. Two and a half years is how long it took for the 1940's USA to go from Pearl Harbor to D-Day.
And once again Felienne Hermans is proven right about the world running on spreadsheets and that we should take them a lot more seriously for that reason alone.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw</a>
Excel is an incredible swiss army knife that <i>can</i> be used to do a lot, but it has a mean-time-to-catastrophe. You can keep spreadsheet risk (==cost) under control for a long time, which can make it seem like the risk is negligible, but it's a ticking time bomb.