Connect It: Why FinanceKey is Taking a Different View on Excel

The treasury technology industry has declared war on spreadsheets. We haven’t.

Open any TMS vendor’s marketing material and you will find some version of the same message: Excel is the enemy. It is the source of risk, the cause of errors, the relic of a less sophisticated age. The implicit, and sometimes explicit, promise is that if you buy their system and migrate your data onto their platform, you can finally put Excel in the bin where it belongs.

At FinanceKey, we think that is the wrong conversation entirely.

We are not here to take Excel away from treasurers. We are here to make it better. Our view, simply put, is this: Connect It.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Before we explain what we mean, it is worth pausing on a basic fact that much of the treasury technology industry seems determined to ignore: Excel is not dying. Not even close.

More than 1 billion people use Microsoft Excel worldwide. It is installed in 750 million businesses across virtually every industry and geography on earth. In a 2023 survey by the Association for Financial Professionals, over 75% of treasury teamsreported that Excel remains a core part of their daily workflow… even those who already have a TMS in place.

And Microsoft, far from treating Excel as a legacy product to be quietly wound down, is betting heavily on its future. The introduction of Python in Excel in 2023 brought one of the world’s most powerful data science languages directly into the spreadsheet environment. Microsoft Copilotintegration means users can now interrogate their data, build models, and generate analysis using natural language. These are not the investments of a company managing decline. These are the investments of a company doubling down on a product used by a billion people.

The rise of the spreadsheet empire

It is easy to understand why Excel has such a hold. For a finance professional, it is close to a perfect tool: infinitely flexible, deeply familiar, analytically powerful, and entirely in their control. A treasurer can build a cash flow model in Excel that reflects exactly how their business works: their entities, currencies and logic, in a way that no out-of-the-box TMS report will ever quite replicate. That is not a bug. That is a feature.

The implication is often that the tool itself is the problem. We disagree with that framing. The problem has never been Excel. The problem is disconnected Excel.

The Real Problem: Stale Data, Parallel Systems

Here is how the Excel problem actually manifests in treasury teams. A treasurer exports their positions from the TMS at 9am. They paste the data into their model. They do their analysis. They email the spreadsheet to their CFO. Meanwhile, a cash movement happens at 10am. The TMS is updated. The model is not. The CFO is now making decisions based on a number that is already wrong.

This is the version control problem. It is not an Excel problem — it is a data connectivity problem. And it is entirely solvable without asking anyone to abandon a tool they have spent years mastering.

The industry’s response has largely been to say: put everything in the TMS and use our reports. The FinanceKey response is different: keep Excel if you love it, but connect it to a live source of truth.

What “Connect It” Actually Means

FinanceKey is built on an open data architecture that exposes treasury data through oData feeds…an industry-standard protocol that connects directly to Excel. Rather than exporting a static snapshot that begins ageing the moment it is saved, users connect their Excel models to FinanceKey and pull live data on demand.

What does that look like in practice?

Imagine a group treasurer opens their Excel cash positioning model on a Monday morning. Rather than exporting and pasting, they simply hit refresh. The model pulls live balances, live transaction data, and live FX rates directly from FinanceKey. Every entity, every currency, every account, all updated in real time. They can then apply their own logic, their own formulas, their own formatting, and produce analysis that reflects both the live state of their treasury and the specific way their business thinks about that data.

The spreadsheet is no longer a parallel system running alongside the TMS. It is a front-end to the TMS.Flexible and familiar on the surface, rigorous and connected underneath.

And with Python in Excel and Copilot now able to work on that live data, the analytical possibilities expand considerably. A treasurer can run a Python-based scenario analysis on live cash positions. They can ask Copilot to summarise their liquidity exposure in natural language. They are getting the full power of Microsoft’s investment in Excel, applied to data that is actually current.

This also solves the governance problem that genuinely does surround Excel usage in treasury. When data flows in one direction — from a controlled, auditable source into Excel, rather than being entered manually or copy-pasted from multiple places — the integrity of the spreadsheet improves dramatically. There is a single source of truth. There is a clear data lineage. The CFO reviewing that model can be confident that the numbers it contains are the same numbers the TMS holds.

Connect It is not about lowering standards for data governance. It is about achieving those standards without forcing people to give up the tools they work best with.

A View Built on Conviction

The treasury technology industry has spent a decade telling treasurers what they should want. We think treasurers already know what they want. They want control, flexibility, and confidence in their data. Excel gives them the first two. FinanceKey gives them the third — and connects all three together.

So the next time a vendor tells you it is time to put Excel in the bin, ask them a simple question: why?The data, the users, and Microsoft itself all suggest it is not going anywhere. The question worth asking is not whether to use Excel, but how to use it properly.

At FinanceKey, our answer is Connect It.

Would you expect anything else from a company whose founders came out of a business with the slogan Connecting People?