Centage vs Excel: End Your Spreadsheet Dread

“Excel had become extremely painful whenever I needed to layer on another acquisition or modify my projections”.

Russell Taylor, Controller, Mountain View Hospital

Centage saves our users hours (if not days) in budget and forecast creation, thanks in large part to our unique formula-free FP&A™ design.

Many of our users create their annual budget twice as fast in Centage as they were able to in Excel – some of them save even more time on this hairy annual process.

Other users find more dramatic time savings in repetitive, manual processes like rolling up multiple P&Ls, creating reports for multiple locations or entities, and modeling what-if scenarios on the fly.

Here’s a quick breakdown of how Centage compares with Excel for the time spent on common FP&A tasks:

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"Prior to Centage I’d have a spreadsheet with 20 tabs, all of which were linked to a GAAP-based P&L on the first tab. I’d spend hours pulling all the information to it, and once I did, I’d spend more hours ensuring it proofed out”.‍

Shelly Golly, Controller, Price Family Vineyards  

Not only does Centage add time back to your schedule – it gives you the tools to put that time to use for strategic, value-added work.

Centage unlocks capabilities to perform flexible, granular reporting that are simply impossible in Excel without dedicating an unreasonable amount of resources to the task:

• Quarterly (or monthly) reforecasting.
• Budget contributors from across departments access a centralized database, not a file that’s shared around.
• Real-time scenario planning and what-if models created in minutes.

These gains in operational efficiency trickle down to meaningful overhead savings. Some of our customers chose Centage because performing the type of granular forecasting and reporting that the CFO or other leadership required would have required hiring additional accounting staff just to perform manual calculations and inevitably find & fix Excel formula errors.

“My first year here the budget was a chaotic collection of Excel spreadsheets that were emailed around, and lost version control with each hop. The budgets themselves had two different charts of accounts, ledgers, and revenue recognition methods. It became very evident that we needed one source of truth for all things budgeting and forecasting”.

Peter Welch, CFO, Heartland

The choice between Centage and Excel depends on the specific objectives, scale, and complexity of your FP&A process. Here’s a detailed comparison chart outlining the key differences in functionality between Centage and Excel:

Book a demo to see how switching from Excel to Centage for your budgeting, planning, and forecasting can redirect your time from manual error-hunting to strategic work.