NavOps or Excel for steering the IT budget: the comparison

What Excel does very well

Let us start there, because it is true. A spreadsheet is flexible, immediate, free or already paid for, and everyone knows how to open one. For one entity, one budget year and one person keeping the file, it does the job. Many CIOs have built a clean budget in there, with tabs per spend category, actuals tracking and a few projection formulas. None of that is a problem.

Where the spreadsheet breaks

The spreadsheet breaks when the structure it describes becomes more complicated than it is. Three situations come up almost every time.

Several entities. Each subsidiary keeps its own file, with its own columns. The consolidated view is a fourth file, fed by copy and paste, that is right on the day it is produced and wrong the next, as soon as a subsidiary corrects a forecast without saying so. Internal cross-charges inflate the total, or are removed by hand, differently every month.

Several budget years. Y-1, Y and Y+1 live in different tabs or files, which drift apart as corrections pile up. The question “what will next year cost if we decide nothing” is rebuilt every time, and the answer depends on who rebuilds it.

Contracts. They sit in another file, in a shared folder, or in someone’s head. The budget does not know how much of the spend is already committed by signed contracts, and the contract file does not know what each one really costs. The automatic renewal is discovered after the date.

Add to that the limits one accepts until the day they cost something: no access rights per entity (whoever has the file sees everything), no trace of who changed what, a backup that depends on a laptop or a share, and a single person able to keep it alive.

Criterion by criterion

Criterion	Excel spreadsheet	NavOps
Group and subsidiary consolidation	Monthly copy and paste, right on the day it is produced	Continuous reading of the same data, internal cross-charges flagged
Three budget years Y-1 / Y / Y+1	Separate tabs or files, which drift apart	One repository of budget years, the trajectory is read
Budget versus actuals variance	Formulas to maintain, landing rebuilt by hand	Computed continuously from the spend lines
Run / Build, CAPEX / OPEX	One column, if someone created it and fills it in	Attributes carried by every line, read as axes
Contracts and expiry dates	Separate file, manual or missing alerts	Attached to spend, radar of expiries and automatic renewals
Cost per application	Rarely known, declarative when it exists	Drawn from the attached contracts and lines
Access rights per entity	None: whoever has the file sees everything	A role carries a scope of entities
Change traceability	None, or the version history of the share	Traced on sensitive data
Backup and security	Those of the laptop or the share	Encryption, backups and per-customer isolation, or your own server On-Premise
Reversibility	Total: it is a file	Export in an open format, at any time, with no paid add-on
Cost	Zero in licences, high in consolidation time	Per scope steered, unlimited users

When to stay on Excel

Stay on Excel if you steer a single entity, one budget year at a time, with one person keeping the file and a number of contracts you can know by heart. The spreadsheet is then the right tool, and a cockpit would only add data entry.

When to move to NavOps

The time has come when at least two of these sentences are true: you steer two entities or more; the monthly consolidation takes you more than half a day; a contract renewed without you deciding it; management asks for a three-year trajectory you rebuild at every committee; you cannot say, without searching, what an application or a supplier really costs across every entity.

What about Power BI?

A reporting tool reads data, it does not manage it. Plugging Power BI into Excel files gives you handsome dashboards on figures that are still entered, consolidated and corrected by hand. NavOps holds the reference data; what it produces exports in an open format, and can feed your existing reporting tools if you want to keep them.

NavOps or the CIO’s Excel spreadsheet?