Well, we had a very successful conclusion to our first contest, our iPad giveaway.

We had asked you to tell us: What is the biggest, hairiest spreadsheet report you had to build, and why was it so difficult?

You did so and we received some great stories, which I’ll get into later.

First, here’s the video of the live raffle drawing broadcast we did today in Houston:

You can see on the video what our winner described as his largest spreadsheet reporting headache.

Here are some other  really interesting ones.

The sheer complexity of some reports got people down. An owner of an apparel company reported:

“I had to create a matrix style spreadsheet for my bra inventory. Bra style, band size, cup size, color or fabric for over 3 dozen patterns. The sheer number of bra combinations for my size run 28A-52N made the creation of just what we had in stock a HUGE task!”

We also noticed many people complaining about the sheer time it took to create reports with many different variables. The CFO at a professional ceiling, painting and sheetrock contracting company wrote:

“My job costing report (is the hardest report).  I have to manually import the data from QuickBooks to an Excel spreadsheet each month. It consists of pulling the estimate vs. actual numbers from QB for about 200 jobs, one by one. It takes easily a solid 8-10 hours a month to do, minimum.”

A big complaint that seemed to be reported over and over was the difficulty in pulling data from different systems. For example, the owner of an outsourced CFO service said:

“(The biggest problem I had) was probably a utilization reort that was a combination of data from a variety of courses, all data was repeatedly entered into the different systems in different formats and had to be cleansed and merged on a regular basis. This was further compounded by ‘too many cooks’ having their hands on the spreadsheets.”

Don’t we all just want one version of the truth?

However, some of the biggest business pains we noticed were the difficulty in predicting cash flow with spreadsheet reports, or the difficulty in determining if they were profitable. The owner of a gaming company told us:

“I have to run at least 20 reports in QuickBooks, clean them up in Excel, and send it back to QB and then see if the company actually made money or not. I’d like to see something automatic that gives me good, accurate data all the time.”

In a future post I’ll discuss how some of these spreadsheet headaches can be alleviated, and we may choose another lucky winner to receive a free account to KPI Online as a solution to their spreadsheet nightmares!

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