r/Accounting • u/Standard_Gur30 CPA (US) • 6h ago
Worst Excel you’ve seen.
My best was four pages taped together because the client didn’t know how to format, but the part that had me literally laughing out loud was the adding machine tape stapled to each column. Totals were not in the spreadsheet. I introduced the client to AutoSum and blew their mind.
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u/Monte_Cristos_Count 6h ago
40 different Excel spreadsheets tracking operations for a company. They all had to be manually updated (no automations, no connections, no referencing) every week. It was a terrible inefficient way to use Excel
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u/xx420mcyoloswag 6h ago
Any client excel where every period they just add in a new sheet and you end up with 1000 tabs going back to 2005 — I really don’t need the 2014 Q3 QTD IS and quite frankly it’s slowing down my laptop
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u/Hopeful_Sorbet9511 6h ago
No one beating that. That shit cray
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u/Square_Bowl_1136 6h ago
the way people just accept chaos like that and call it a working file is something else
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u/Embarrassed_Roof8165 3h ago
As a lender, someone had been updating the model monthly by importing monthly GL data as a new tab and manually summing to get the relevant data. 100+ tabs. They played it off as an accomplishment.
Honorable mention: Not truly a file, but was talking through something with a ~50yo coworker. She was trying to add two numbers, they proceeded to get out a calculator to add them together then typed them in below.
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u/muirsheendurkin 3h ago
This one is pretty tame. But when i was indistry I had a spreadsheet that tracked sales every month. Part of it was a line graph. The file was huge enough to freeze my computer when I worked on it, and couldn't figure out why. Turns out they had set it up where each month they generated a new graph instead of just updating the data. This sheet was years old, there must've been 100 line graphs stacked on top of each other.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_TAXRETURN 4h ago
I had one that was used to help KPMG file our taxes or something and it was so huge that if you typed anything or made a small change it would run for several minutes and make my laptop sound like a drone getting ready for lift off.
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u/Arrow_to_the_knee1 2h ago
An inventory tracking spreadsheet. The person who made it wanted to color code the rows and columns to make it easier to read. Only, instead of highlighting the cells to change their color, they would click the row or column and change the entire thing. Hundreds of thousands of active cells, but only about 600 cells were used.
I couldn't print it without specifying the pages to print, because it was hundreds of pages long. It took forever to open, because the file was massive. Also, the person who created it quit before I started, so I received no instructions on how it worked, and there were no written instructions.
Ultimately, I abandoned it and created my own version.
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u/TDot-26 1h ago
This sounds like it would be ridiculously easy to fix. Click the last column, ctrl alt arrow over to the end of the sheet, delete it all/unhighlight it all, do the same with the rows
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u/thefrankwhite 2h ago
Guy learned how to merge cells but not how to increase the size of columns and rows…
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u/Meterian 1h ago edited 53m ago
Most recent was a Rent roll sheet that was two columns wide - a name column and the monthly rent, which was a number hard coded and some of them rounded to the nearest 10 cents. No headers or totals. Absolutely no detail on where the numbers came from, checks, background calculations, what was included in their rent... Nothing.
The second file containing a second category of renters was the same, but it was divided into 3 parts - for profit companies, non-profit companies and a third group that I never figured out what it was for.
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u/DutchTinCan 43m ago
I once audited the investment vehicle for a major insurance party.
Their investment software was bad enough; in the mid 2010s still, it couldn't export to pdf. Or to any digital format.
It could print, but not to any normal printer. It had to be a 1980s matrix printer with paper reams. Meaning any printout would require the junior staff to separate the papers and scan them.
Now, where does Excel come in? This wasn't exclusively our problem. The lack of digital exports also meant it couldn't be integrated with the finance system. So every day, they'd make printouts of all positions and transactions to manually enter. Some guy at some moment in the distant past built a bunch of macro's to ease the workload.
That ended up with a bunch of spreadsheets with instructions along "Obtain printout FB01-4 for the day. Enter the figure TRANSACTION_TOTAL in cell D4. Press button. Email file to next person."
The next person would receive similar instructions. "Copy cell D4 from emailed file....".
A few years in, nobody knew what they were doing. They were supposed to reconcile books between the insurance company and the investment fund.
Did the walkthroughs; turns out the guy who thought he was booking payables on the investment fund side was actually booking the receivables on the insurance company side, and so on.
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u/ReasonableBandicoot8 0m left
Luckily in Germany even small companies use mostly professional (more or less) accounting software. Excel is widespread as the output path from accounting software.
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u/ButlerChubs327 5h ago
Top 10 Bank had a NII file with hardcoded subtotals, totals and linked sheets going back to the early 2000’s. Everything was manually linked, no lookups/sumifs, file was so rigid if you moved any columns (to add lookups for summaries) there would be ref errors everywhere.
There was no uniform reporting trees (or anything for that matter) and someone updated one of the biggest LOB’s and told no one before a quarter end and this behemoth (178MB) was useless.
Whole companies reporting was based on popsicle sticks and bubble gum.