Excel is rarely the problem in finance. What happens is businesses outgrow the Excel capabilities that once served them well, and multi-entity reporting in Excel is usually where the strain shows first.
Most teams run everything through spreadsheets. Modeling, budgeting, reporting, consolidation. The setup works well when the company is small, and it keeps working right up until the business matures past it. More entities, more budget owners, more reports. At that point, the spreadsheets that once moved fast slow the whole cycle down.
The interesting part is what finance teams do next. Most of them do not throw Excel out; they adapt around it, adding people and manual steps until the process holds together on effort alone.
Two finance leaders took a different route. In a recent Vivid Customer Spotlight session, Kyle Veum of Forum Communications and Bill Mitchell of Damuth Associates walked through how they run budgeting and multi-entity reporting today. Their companies could not look more different in size or structure, yet their solution to spreadsheet chaos was close to identical: keep Excel for what it does well and put a structure around it for everything else.
Excel stays, but its job changes
Forum Communications runs finance across a company with 800 employees and 47 reporting entities. Multiple divisions, multiple systems, and a level of complexity where a wall of disconnected spreadsheets turns fragile fast.
Excel is still at the center of how the team works. What changed is which jobs stay in Excel, and which jobs move to a structured system.
“The Excel modeling environment is very valuable, especially for ad hoc forecasts,” Kyle said.
So the team drew a clear line between the two. Excel handles the flexible work, the forecasting and modeling and quick analysis where speed matters more than structure, while a structured layer handles reporting, consistency, and distribution. That separation keeps creativity on one side and control on the other, so finance can still move quickly in a spreadsheet without putting the accuracy of the final reports at risk. It is the practical version of creating automated reports in Excel, where the spreadsheet stays the workspace and the structure handles the repeatable work.
Budgeting at scale without the manual overhead
Budgeting is where the shift becomes concrete.
At Forum, budgeting spans the whole organization, with inputs arriving from many budget owners. In practice, that means managing a large volume of spreadsheets at once.
“I have 147 worksheets. I update a master worksheet, and it flows through everything,” Kyle said.
Before that structure existed, the work was manual and repetitive. Someone copied prior-year files, updated formulas sheet by sheet, consolidated inputs by hand, and chased budget owners constantly to get the numbers in. The real cost was not only the hours it took, but the consistency of the numbers, because every spreadsheet carried its own risk of a broken formula or an outdated figure.
Centralizing the logic in a master worksheet changed that. A single update now flows across everything, and budget owners still work in Excel, inside a controlled framework, without having to manage the complexity themselves.
The result shows up most clearly in the timeline.
“We wouldn’t get done with the budget until January. Now we consistently hit September 30,” Kyle said.
Same team, same process at a high level, with months of friction removed.
A one-person finance team managing real complexity
Damuth Associates runs on the opposite end of the size range, yet lands in the same place.
Bill Mitchell manages finance as a one-person team (a self-styled SFO, or Single Financial Officer) across nine entities that span trusts, real estate, investment companies, and a nonprofit foundation. Different ownership structures, different reporting requirements, and a nonprofit on a different fiscal year. He handles multi-entity reporting in Excel on his own, across all of them.
A setup like that leaves no room for wasted steps, because every extra task lands on the same desk and pushes the close later. Bill built his reporting around a single Excel workbook of 19 tabs covering financial statements, supporting schedules, and a narrative section, with consolidated views across all the entities. What makes it work is how the data moves into those tabs.
“It takes about 20 seconds to update all of the tabs,” Bill said.
For a lean team, that speed is not a convenience; it’s a non-negotiable part of keeping month-end reporting sustainable. The Vivid structure behind the workbook lets one person carry a reporting load that would normally take a larger group.
From summary to detail in a click
Both leaders pointed to the same capability when asked what changed day to day: how fast they move from a summary figure to the transaction behind it.
“It is one click, and one more click to get the transaction detail,” Bill said.
That removes a familiar bottleneck. When a number looks off, there is no exporting data or building a separate report to chase it down, because the detail sits one click behind the summary. The payoff is faster explanations, fewer follow-up questions, and more confidence in the numbers going to leadership. That same drill-down capability changes how finance spends its day, which we cover in why finance teams spend more time explaining numbers than using them.
What actually changed
Across both teams, the tools stayed familiar. The workflow is what changed.
“All that follow-up, that’s gone,” Kyle said.
The manual work that used to fill the calendar, the chasing of inputs, the fixing of spreadsheets, and the reconciling of differences across files, is largely gone. Data flows in a consistent way, and the reports reflect what has already been committed, and that consistency is what frees a finance team to spend more time reading the numbers than assembling them.
A more practical way forward
Neither team abandoned Excel, and neither rebuilt how their people work or added complexity for its own sake. They made a simpler change. They kept Excel for flexibility, added structure where consistency mattered, centralized the logic instead of duplicating it across files, and took out the manual steps wherever they appeared.
For a lot of finance teams, that is the real opportunity. When reporting feels heavier than it should, the cause is usually the number of disconnected spreadsheets in the process rather than Excel itself.
For these clients, Vivid simplifies financial reporting by automating all the manual steps across the process. Multi-entity reporting in Excel becomes a refresh instead of a rebuild. Finance teams stay in the Excel they already know while Vivid adds the structure behind the scenes, centralizing how data flows into reports, and removing the manual work that slows the cycle down.
Both teams came to Vivid while moving off older accounting systems, and a system change is often what brings a reporting problem to the surface. For finance teams working through one, our ERP transition guide covers how to protect reporting continuity through the move.
Vivid is freeing financial team capacity, work that used to take days takes minutes, providing not only the time for finance to achieve more, but the tools to make the implementation steps of transformation smaller and more approachable.
