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Excel remains central to finance because professionals do more than read reports. They investigate variances, build forecasts, test assumptions, and turn financial data into decisions.
The challenge is the manual work around it. Exports, copy-and-paste processes, rebuilt formulas, and multiple report versions can make Excel-based reporting difficult to scale.
To explore how finance teams can take Excel further in the AI era, Ace Cloud Hosting spoke with Chris Meyer, Co-Founder and CEO of Finatical Software.
Chris has spent much of his career at the intersection of Excel, financial reporting, automation, and finance technology. Before Finatical, he served as CEO of Excel4apps, an Excel-based reporting company for Oracle and SAP that was acquired by Insight Software in 2018.
In this conversation, he explains why Excel remains essential to finance teams, where QuickBooks Online reporting can become limiting, how QBO and Excel can work together without repetitive exports, and how AI can help turn financial data into analysis, recommendations, and better business decisions.
Q1. With new finance and analytics platforms available, why does Excel remain so important to finance teams, and where does it still outperform dedicated reporting tools?
Excel remains important because finance professionals don’t just consume financial information; they work with it. They model scenarios, investigate variances, combine financial and operational data, build forecasts, and adapt reports to answer questions that weren’t anticipated when the reporting system was designed. Excel is their everyday “workbench”.
Dedicated reporting and analytics platforms can be excellent at standardization, visualization, and distributing information. But Excel continues to dominate in the area of flexibility. A finance professional can start with a financial statement, drill into an unexpected variance, add assumptions, build a scenario, and turn that analysis into a recommendation—all within a familiar environment.
That’s why we don’t see Excel disappearing from finance. The bigger opportunity is to eliminate its traditional weaknesses. When Excel is dependent on exports, copy-and-paste processes, and manually maintained spreadsheets, it can become fragile and difficult to govern. But when Excel is connected directly to trusted, structured financial data, it becomes something much more powerful: a flexible decision-support environment.
The future isn’t about replacing Excel. It’s about giving finance professionals better data and better tools inside the environment where they already do much of their analytical thinking.
Q2. Can tools such as Claude and ChatGPT genuinely take Excel-based financial reporting to the next level? Which use cases are delivering practical value today?
Absolutely, and the biggest opportunity isn’t just having AI create prettier spreadsheets. It’s using AI to help finance professionals understand what the numbers mean and what they should do next.
Today, tools such as Claude and ChatGPT can help analyze financial results, identify unusual trends and variances, explain changes between periods, summarize performance for management, build or troubleshoot formulas, develop forecasts and scenarios, and turn detailed financial information into concise management commentary.
For example, instead of simply producing a monthly P&L, a controller or fractional CFO can use AI to help answer questions such as: What’s driving the margin decline? Which expense categories are changing fastest? Is the current cash position consistent with historical trends? What should management investigate?
But there’s an important prerequisite: AI is only as useful as the data you give it. If the underlying financial information is inconsistent, stale, or poorly structured, AI can produce very convincing but unreliable analysis. That’s why we believe structured financial data is becoming even more important in the AI era.
Connect trusted financial data with Excel’s flexibility and AI’s analytical capabilities, and you create a very powerful combination.
Q3. Based on your work with QuickBooks Online and Finatical, where does QBO’s native financial reporting fall short as a business grows or its reporting requirements become more complex?
QuickBooks Online does an excellent job of accounting and provides the standard financial statements most businesses need. The limitations tend to appear when management wants to go beyond standard financial reporting.
As businesses grow, they often want highly customized management reports, reporting across multiple QBO companies, more sophisticated comparisons, management-specific KPIs, recurring board or client reporting packages, and financial data combined with budgets, forecasts, or operational information. That’s where many finance teams turn to Excel.
The challenge is that the traditional way of getting QBO data into Excel—exporting reports and then copying, pasting, reformatting, and rebuilding them every month—creates a new set of problems. The spreadsheet may look exactly the way management wants, but maintaining it becomes increasingly manual and risky.
We think the better model is to separate the accounting system from the reporting and analysis environment. QBO remains the system of record. Excel becomes the flexible reporting and decision-support layer. The key is connecting the two so that finance teams aren’t continually exporting and rebuilding their work.
Q4. How can finance teams connect QBO and Excel without creating duplicated data, broken formulas, conflicting report versions, or excessive manual work?
The key is to stop treating Excel as a destination for exported data and instead treat it as a connected reporting environment.
A well-designed QBO-to-Excel workflow should maintain one authoritative source of accounting data—QBO—while allowing Excel reports to refresh from that source. That eliminates much of the copying and pasting that causes duplicate data, broken formulas, formatting problems, and version confusion.
At Finatical, this is the approach we’ve taken with Flash Reports. Rather than exporting a new report every month, finance professionals can build the Excel workbook they want—including their formulas, formatting, calculations, charts, commentary, and management reporting structure—and then just refresh the underlying QBO financial data.
This becomes particularly valuable for accounting firms, fractional CFOs, and businesses managing multiple QBO entities. Instead of rebuilding reporting packages every month, they can create repeatable reporting workflows.
The principle is simple: keep the accounting data in the accounting system, keep the analysis and presentation in Excel, and create a reliable connection between them. This preserves Excel’s flexibility without accepting the manual processes that have traditionally made spreadsheet-based reporting difficult to scale.
Q5. How is AI changing the progression from financial reporting to analysis, recommendations, and decisions? What are the most important dos and don’ts for finance teams adopting it?
For decades, a large portion of a finance professional’s time has been spent producing the numbers. Technology has steadily reduced that burden, and AI can accelerate the next stage of the transformation. We think about the progression as:
Report → Analysis → Recommendation → Decision
Traditional reporting tells management what happened. Analysis explains why it happened. Recommendations identify what the business could do about it. Ultimately, the value comes from helping management make a better decision.
AI can dramatically accelerate the middle of that process. It can identify patterns, investigate variances, summarize large amounts of financial information, suggest questions to explore, and help finance professionals evaluate different scenarios.
But finance teams shouldn’t outsource judgment to AI.
Do start with trusted, structured data. Use AI to accelerate analysis and challenge your thinking. Ask follow-up questions. Validate important conclusions against the underlying financial information. Keep a finance professional responsible for the final recommendation.
Don’t assume that a confident AI response is necessarily the correct one. Don’t give AI poorly controlled or inconsistent data and expect reliable conclusions. And don’t view AI simply as a way to automate the work finance already does.
The bigger opportunity is to use AI to change where finance professionals spend their time—less time assembling reports and more time interpreting information, advising management, and influencing decisions.
In that sense, AI isn’t making the finance professional less important. It’s making the uniquely human parts of the role—judgment, context, communication, and decision support—more important than ever.
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From Reporting to Decision Support
Better reporting matters, but Chris’s perspective points to a broader shift in finance: the real value comes from what teams can do with the information once it is available.
Connecting QuickBooks Online with Excel can reduce repeated exports and manual rebuilding while keeping QBO as the system of record and Excel as the space for analysis, forecasting, and modeling.
AI can take that workflow further by helping teams identify patterns, investigate variances, and explore what management should consider next. But reliable data and professional judgment still come first.
The opportunity is clear: spend less time assembling reports and more time interpreting the numbers, advising the business, and supporting better decisions.
For finance teams working across QuickBooks Online, Excel, AI, and other accounting tools, the technology environment matters too. Ace Cloud Hosting’s Cloud for QuickBooks Online brings QBO, supported applications such as Excel, files, and AI tools into one managed cloud workspace for more controlled access and collaboration.
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