Spreadsheet Sleuth

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Do you have Data Feeds you pay for and don't use?

Do you have Data Feeds you use and don't pay for?

Do your Add-Ins add up?

Do your Macros make sense?

. . . . . . . . . . Or do you just not know how far your sheets are spread?

The Problem

Spreadsheets are coming increasingly under the microscope by Regulators who need to be assured that Financial Institutions are responsible in their use.

• It has been estimated that prior to its recent demise, a major international bank had considerably in excess of 1,000,000 spreadsheets across their systems globally and that this uncontrolled proliferation in no small measure contributed to the collapse.

• Banks have been fined huge sums for failing to manage data, including spreadsheets, effectively.

• Using data, the providence of which cannot be assured, carries massive risks in financial reporting.

• It has been ruled that spreadsheets used in financial reporting should be viewed as IT systems and managed accordingly.

The Solution

Spreadsheet Sleuth is a service which can provide answers to the questions at the top of the page.  Our proprietary investigative tools are used to discover and analyse your organisation's use of spreadsheets. 

Drive by drive we seek them out and spreadsheet by spreadsheet we scrutinise them.  We look for data feeds from both internal and external sources; we identify links to other spreadsheets; we unearth macros.

We can tell you the Who? When? Where and How? of every spreadsheet on your system, highlighting those that may need further attention. 

The Tools

The investigative tools used are themselves spreadsheets containing sophisticated VBA code which find and analyse other spreadsheets.  While some data can be retrieved from closed workbooks, others require that the spreadsheet be open.  Each spreadsheet is opened in sequence to analyse its components.

Written in VBA, the tools can be quickly and easily adapted for further investigation.  From within Excel, for example, it is possible to open and explore any of the other Microsoft Office components such as Word, Access, Project, and PowerPoint.

Credentials

To undertake this important detective work, it is important not only to know a lot about spreadsheets, but also to understand how such products work and what their capabilities are.   BOSS Management develop complete applications in Excel and probably push the functionality to its limits.  We believe that gives us the right to claim that we have the necessary depth  of knowledge and understanding of the product.

The Project

To carry out this kind of exercise all that is required is access to your system(s).  However, the nature of the work creates a pre-requisite for a high level of security access.  It may also be helpful to carry out such investigations when most users are off-line, i.e. outside normal working hours.

An initial meeting will determine your concerns and priorities, and our tools will then be set up accordingly in preparation for the investigation.  The time-scale for the project will depend on the number of systems to be interrogated, access to and availability of those systems, the search criteria, the number of spreadsheets found, etc.