back to article $16B health dept managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn’t gone well

The body that runs New Zealand’s public health system uses a single Excel spreadsheet as the primary source of data to consolidate and manage its finances, which aren’t in great shape perhaps due to the sheet’s shortcomings. The spreadsheet-using agency is Health New Zealand (HNZ) which was established in 2022 to replace 20 …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They could always ask someone with experience of financial management software. Birmingham council?

    1. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge

      Unfortunately, there will be no mention of what can go wrong with the ERP migration or listing horror stories.

      Just sign here for the time and materials contract and all your problems will vanish

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        I've seen that too many times. Here is new system. Can it do a, b an c? Sure. Then they find out it can't really do c and nobody thought to ask for d, e and f. Then there is the inevitable infighting where you try to alter a process to accommodate the new system that can take months to plan out and implement.

        1. Stuart Castle Silver badge

          Reminds me of a story my old Computing lecturer used to tell from a time she was a Systems Analyst.

          She was part of a team that, during the 80s, implemented a huge new computer system for Southwark Council. I *think* it was for Housing, but don't quote me on that. Her team spent months designing the system, and further months implementing and installing it.

          A year or so after the go live date, she was passing and popped into one of the offices to see how the system was going. She didn't see a sign of the terminal they had installed so the staff could access the new system, so she asked the staff about it. Apparently, the terminal was being used. As a door stop.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Land of the long write column

    Oh dear.

    I worked on a large scale project over 25 years ago that used a similar technique.

    Only they PRINTED theirs for manual updating!

    1. Handlebars

      Re: Land of the long write column

      I can see the attraction of this compared to fatfinger spreadsheet errors, and you can do a manual audit.

  3. hitmouse

    Lock 'em up in cell AZ1048576

  4. jockmcthingiemibobb

    Simeon Brown couldn't run a corner shop

  5. Acrimonius

    Maligning Excel

    They will rue the day they maligned Excel. Just needs a lots of VBA to verify/audit and automate/front-end everything and they are good to go. It will however never appease auditors like Deloitte and they are in part to blame for the fore-gone disastrous conclusion the head-first dive into Oracle or SAP will be.

    1. ArrZarr Silver badge
      Headmaster

      Re: Maligning Excel

      I mean, obviously Excel is the incorrect tool for the job - but most of the shortcomings that were flagged in the article are avoidable by building the spreadsheet correctly in the first place.

      Also VBA is cheating. Everything they need to do can be done with raw formulae. That way you don't need to open up the pain of Macro-enabled workbooks.

      1. Acrimonius

        Re: Maligning Excel

        Yeah much about how you set up Excel and there are many pitfalls plus limitations. The VBA front-end with error checking and report creation would just keep the user away from actually editing the cells.

        1. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge
          Coat

          Re: Maligning Excel

          Can't we use Python now?

          1. david 12 Silver badge

            Re: Maligning Excel

            Can't we use Python now? You can, in OO, and it has the advantage that it's a pain in the butt to edit or test, as well as being more obscure.

            Where Python shines vs VBA is with multi-dimensional analysis. So if they decide they want to expand their organization into the 5th dimension, python in OO will be the way to go.

      2. Evil Auditor Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: Maligning Excel

        Ever since I discovered that Excel natively supports arrays, my need for VBA has mostly vanished.

    2. Evil Auditor Silver badge

      Re: Maligning Excel

      I don't believe that Excel is the right tool for a $NZ 28 bn consolidation and reporting - there are dedicated, well-established applications for that purpose. But it might also not be completely off, if done correctly - not sure about VBA though. The tool is rarely the problem and a fool remains a fool, as we all know.

      1. herman Silver badge

        Re: Maligning Excel

        Well, they tried Visicalc, but they wanted to use 64 columns.

    3. greatfog

      Re: Maligning Excel

      Spreadsheet cells showing values, but hiding mathematical expressions that reference other spreadsheet cells showing....

      VBA macros referencing spreadsheet cells through relative row-column addresses...

      Refactor this application?

      Document it?

      Provide a suite of unit tests?

      Holiday in Cambodia, anyone?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Maligning Excel

        Not read the output from a typical jobsworth programmer writing stuff in whatever for a financial system?

        In someways I prefer undocumented Excel…

    4. An_Old_Dog Silver badge
      Flame

      Just Stop with the Effin' "Spreadsheets-for-Everthing" Mentality!

      I'm not maligning Excel, or spreadsheets in general.

      If the only tool you think you know how to use is a spreadsheet, then that's what you'll use. For everything. Presentations. Databases. Word processing. Image manipulation.

      ERP systems frequently are overkill, and too-complex to bring more benefit than the time and money they waste, because they dictate and contort peoples's workflows.

      Does anyone still use accounting software to do ... accounting?

      1. david 12 Silver badge

        Re: Just Stop with the Effin' "Spreadsheets-for-Everthing" Mentality!

        Accounting software is the software you use for book keeping. Book keeping is not, and never has been, the point of management tools like spreadsheets.

  6. sarusa Silver badge
    Devil

    Ayup

    The funniest (saddest?) thing for me is that at one point I would have been outraged, going 'How could this possibly happen!1!?one' and now I'm just 'yep, well of course they did.'

    1. sarusa Silver badge

      Re: Ayup

      Okay, so digging into this further at https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/HNZ-Financial-Review-Report.pdf they actually had a web of manually managed excel spreadsheets, and this central one got updated by people calling each other and going 'yeah my J345 value is...' so it took two weeks every single time they tried to consolidate, with all the errors that go along with that manual process and nobody involved knowing what they're doing.

      This is pretty much what I expect from a government agency, because at least a giant evil corporation wants to make money, but for a government agency all this ramshackle gum and duct tape just creates more jobs.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Ayup

        More likely the ramshackle gum and duct tape is because nobody would fork out for something better - and maybe something better wasn't asked for because the users knew it would it would be if they did. And when all you've got is a hammer....

      2. david 12 Silver badge

        Re: Ayup

        No surprise there, but it does put the process ~35 years out of date -- that's when I was fixing this problem in paper spreadsheets by migrating to automatic consolidation.

        I wonder if their immediate problem exists because everybody who understands spreadsheet automation has reached end-of-career and has retired?

  7. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

    I've seen people screw up annual budgeting in Excel by simply multiplying weekly budgets by four to get "monthly" budgets, then multiplying that by 12...

    I've also seen people manually enter calculation results in Excel after working them out with a calculator.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Indeed.

      I was once asked to update a payroll spreadsheet that included a 100 or more various different pay grades. There was a 2% across the board pay rise. Everyone got it. I simply added a new PA column and set it to be 2% greater than the $ value of the preceding column. Copied the formula to the bottom..

      Great they said!

      Then they printed it and got someone to manually check every line with a pocket calculator!

      1. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge

        Trust, but verify!

        (they may have gotten burned by the Pentium bug, perhaps?)

      2. Terry 6 Silver badge

        That's one of the problems with using complex spreadsheets ( and maybe other complex systems). Ultimately these just become "black boxes" in which you pour numbers in at the top and read other numbers off at the bottom. But there's no telling what the gubbins inside are actually doing to the numbers. At best the users are going to be highly suspicious of the outcomes, at worst they're right to be. The only checks would be to create a duplicate, blank, system, and feed sample numbers in to test for logical outcomes. And even that might not work, if the calculation processes are unknown maybe the expected results are unknown.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          "At best the users are going to be highly suspicious of the outcomes, at worst they're right to be."

          Alternatively the worst they can do is trust them.

          1. Terry 6 Silver badge
            Thumb Up

            Good point

        2. Roland6 Silver badge

          >” That's one of the problems with using complex spreadsheets ( and maybe other complex systems). Ultimately these just become "black boxes" in which you pour numbers in at the top and read other numbers off at the bottom. But there's no telling what the gubbins inside are actually doing to the numbers.”

          That applies to all financial systems including Post Office Horizon…

        3. LybsterRoy Silver badge

          I think you've just invented AI

      3. Sudosu Bronze badge

        Well, sometimes better safe than sorry applies.

        Though I would have done random checks on a percentage of staff and not the whole long list.

      4. Roland6 Silver badge

        Got a client that uses QuickBooks, they don’t trust the QB Payroll ( fully linked to HMRC and Pension provider) and refuse to let go of their Excel payroll worksheets, which contain many magic numbers and calculations based on assumptions which whilst valid when originally written won’t be valid come April (2025)…

    2. Eclectic Man Silver badge
      Unhappy

      The first time ...

      ... that I was made redundant (there is a theme here, more of that later*), I was told I would get "two months salary" as redundancy pay. Well, when I was told the amount I would get it was not 2 month's pay. Now there were three ways to work this out, as we had literally just been told our pay rises (yup, before we were told 60% of the company was being made redundant, we got told of our pay rises - don't ask me, I only worked there). So It could have been twice my pre-rise monthly pay (nope, did not add up), or one month at old pay and one at new pay) not that either or twice new pay - wrong again. So, BEING A COMPLETE IDIOT, I asked. Turned out that, for the purposes of redundancy pay, two months = eight weeks !

      I will never understand accountancy.

      * I have been made redundant several times, mainly due to the companies I worked for going 'TITSUP' (I hope I am not being too technical for you), although the last time was officially 'paid leaver' where I got my annual pay effectively tax free to leave (thank you BT) and have been happily retired ever since.

      1. greatfog

        Re: The first time ...

        The purpose of accountancy is to

        1) show someone how much money they have, and

        2) advise them how to spend as little of it as possible.

    3. Handlebars

      I've seen people eschew Excel in favor of a grid in MS Word

      1. Nick Ryan Silver badge

        I will admit that I have done that in the past. Admittedly it was so the content could be printed out and as Excel's concept of printing is pretty much "open printer device, spew content at printer driver while inserting as many spurious blank pages and near impossible to track down layout issues", there is a reason for that.

        I performed the calculations in Excel and copy and pasted the content (not data link, just the data) into Word so it could be presented in a vaguely presentable manner.

      2. Terry 6 Silver badge

        And if it's a really simple calculation, like adding a few items in a column, that might even be best. I've not done it that way for years, but in hindsight, I can think of a number of times where it would have been better (usually when I wanted the result in a document anyway)

      3. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

        I've also seen an engineer use Powerpoint to mark up and comment drawings.

        Which, when you're familiar with it, can be more convenient than doing it by hand. But also, Powerpoint?!

  8. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
    Facepalm

    20 district health boards

    HNZ is a minnow compared to NHS England, said to be the largest employer in Europe. Comprised of a couple of hundred or more Trusts and hundreds more entities. .

    https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/structure-of-the-nhs/

    It's so big that they themselves can't explain the structure or funding themselves, instead directing the reader to resources produced by the Kings Fund.

    The NHS England machine is a very big beast that has a huge appetite for £££

    1. ColinPa Silver badge

      Re: 20 district health boards

      30 years ago our multi national organisation was bloated it had 11 levels between CEO and the grunts. To get a new screen you had put in a justification, which had to be signed off by 2+ people!.

      Many of the approvers just approved... and never disapproved.

      The CEO got rid of 3-4 layers of management, and said every manager can sign of expenses up to £500, and need a 2nd line approval for up to $5000. It was a breath of fresh air.

      The head of one of the divisions went in with his "annual leave card" and asked the CEO to approve him taking a week off. The CEO said "You are in charge of a multi million division - if you cannot manage your own vacation you are in the wrong job".

      I hear,that on the CEO's first day, his PA told him,"We've printed out all of your emails for you... I'm ready to take dictation for your replies". The CEO said "I'll do my own emails - unfiltered. Some I'll ask you to handle. Get me my email address NOW"

    2. eldakka

      Re: 20 district health boards

      So you are saying they use TWO Excel spreadsheets to manage the NHS?

      1. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: 20 district health boards

        Who knows - it's the organisation that gave us this

        https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/05/excel_england_coronavirus_contact_error/

        May be if there are any NHS Whistleblowers, we'll get to know

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: 20 district health boards

          The organisation that gave us that was Public Health England (PHE), not NHS (England)…

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 20 district health boards

      Ah, but the NHS being so big and composed of so many entities is highly effective at avoiding accountability. I expect I'm not the only one on here who has been passed round a circle of 3 (or more) NHS entities, all of which claims that one of the others is responsible for dealing with the issue!

      1. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
        Facepalm

        How To Run A Hospital

        Sir Humphrey explains why a hospital with no patients requires even more workers.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAk448volww

  9. xyz Silver badge

    That prediction was incorrect and HNZ blew its budget

    Ah... They renewed their office 365 subscription.

    1. FirstTangoInParis Silver badge

      Re: That prediction was incorrect and HNZ blew its budget

      And they haven’t yet spotted they’re being charged for Copilot, which will doubtless just triple the confusion.

    2. Sudosu Bronze badge

      Re: That prediction was incorrect and HNZ blew its budget

      They probably tried to migrated it to PowerPlatform.

  10. PCScreenOnly

    Uk gvt, oracle + outsourcing

    At least an excel spreadsheet is considerably cheaper for the same experience

  11. IamAProton

    Excel is okay-ish for short term data fiddling.

    Once they file gets older and complicated and many people use it, the data is guaranteed to be unreliable if not plainly wrong. Sometimes it might be ok when you look at it, but good luck importing it into a database. Usually the only way is to go from excel to access and from access to sql server, but still with no guarantees of correctness.

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
      Facepalm

      The only proper, professional way to do things is analyze the data and the requirements and set up a proper SQL database (no, not in Access) to handle the job.

      Of course, it would seem that this approach is going to fall over at the analysis stage . . .

      1. An_Old_Dog Silver badge

        MS Access

        I recall once setting up something quick in Access for a department head. But, I didn't use Access as the database engine; I just used it as the read-only UI. I tied that UI to our Oracle database via ODBC.

        The department head was delighted with what I'd done. I later learned they had exported (cut-and-pasted?) certain data from the Access front end into Excel, where they generated reports which probably were better done with a simple SQL query...

  12. Khaptain Silver badge

    Maturity

    Isn't there a saying that one can determine the maturity of a company in relation to the usage of Excel for these kinds of tasks.

    1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

      Re: Maturity

      Maturity, or age?

      1. that one in the corner Silver badge

        Re: Maturity

        To determine the age, count the rings of spreadsheets.

        Look for the Apple ][ on life support in Accounts Receivable running VisiCalc that feeds to multiple Lotus 123 boxes in Shipping and Warehousing which export CSV to one IBM XT (the one with the new HDD card) running Multiplan to format data for Access which exports to a shared folder as a data source to an IIS webpage that is scraped into Excel sheets for middle management who retype the numbers into emails for the CFO's PA to put into a PowerPoint.

        The monthly finance meeting has a standard itinerary item for the Accounts Payable guy to read from his Dataday pocket ringbinder. The final answer to "what is the age of this system" is written on the reverse of the 1980s London Underground map at the back of this weathered leatherbound volume.

        CTO's summary: The Requirements Spec phase of the ERP transfer is entering its third year and we remain optimistic.

  13. K555

    The poor poor helpdesk

    How many calls do you think they take along the lines of "I've got real problems with my PC, Excel keeps crashing"

    Of course, I mean relative to the usual amount.

  14. Primus Secundus Tertius

    Excel-lent work

    Spreadsheets are fine if you know what you are doing. But then they get handed over to clerical staff ...

    Also they are a pain for quality assurance and auditors, as they are so easily altered with no record of what was done.

    1. Eclectic Man Silver badge

      Re: Excel-lent work

      Spreadsheets are fine if you know what you are doing.

      See - Dunning-Kruger effect. Lots of people believe they know what they are doing, but objective evidence often suggests otherwise. See, for example: https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/10/incident_response_advice/

      As I wrote recently in one of my few published letters to the press:

      "The most important thing to know about anyone in a position of authority, is how they react to being told they are wrong."

      (Oh, and for the avoidance of doubt, if you have any decision making authority, THIS MEANS YOU.)

    2. Sudosu Bronze badge

      Re: Excel-lent work

      The audit trail is the critical one that I bet they got flagged for.

      If it is that old I bet the author of the sheet is administrator.

    3. Handlebars

      Re: Excel-lent work

      If you know what you're doing, have excellent attention to detail, first class keyboard skills, not being rushed by the boss. The other day I noticed some implausible numbers in an Excel sheet. The person who built it had selected an incomplete range in a calculation. Easily mistake to make and I blame their employer for making them use Excel when they are more than capable in SQL and other proper tools.

  15. Aldnus

    If it aint broke

    Why use a database if you don't need to. These dbases are just licenses to print money for the likes of SAP and ORACLE. New zealand total population is just ove 5 million, Birmingham is over 1.1 million for the city !!!!!!

    The spreadsheet will be income/outgoings for the service deptartments with sub excel sheets for specfic depts and expenditure. So whats the problem.

    1. ColinPa Silver badge

      Re: If it aint broke

      Multiple people wanting to update records in the spread sheet/database at the same time, and providing audit trails.

      High availability

      1. l8gravely

        Re: If it aint broke

        Double entry book keeping to actually track stuff properly?

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: If it aint broke

          AIUI the problem with Horizon was that the different sides of the ledgers were updated by separate transactions via an unreliable communication link. This is why you use database applications that wrap the whole business transaction into a single database transaction and that transation is either committed in its entirety or rolled back.

          1. Nick Ryan Silver badge

            Re: If it aint broke

            There were many more problems with Horizon than just that.

            Starting with the utterly inappropriate development environment, Visual Basic which is suitable for hobbyist nightmares and not a lot else. Then add in utterly insane data practices which did convoluted things to the data for no remotely sane reason such as unnecessary application side data mangling, column stuffing storing numeric and date fields in string fields and so on - every elementary basic failure was exhibited. Throw in a bundle of lies that everything is perfect when there was ample evidence everywhere that it was not and a criminal culture mindset that "5% of transactions failing" was somehow acceptable - anything over 0% of transactions failing for anything other than expected and handled reasons is unacceptable.

            The lack of atomicity in database operations naturally didn't help matters but it was far from the key failing

      2. Korev Silver badge
        Joke

        Re: If it aint broke

        > High availability

        Just make five copies of the file...

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: If it aint broke

          With names something like this:

          Amended version

          Final version

          Updated version

          Amended final version

          Last version II

          All of which have different edits in them by different (or possibly the same) people...

  16. Beaten down IT GUY

    Managing those kind of financials in a spreadsheet is criminal malfeasance .. Everyone knowing of and using the spreadsheet for that propose should be arrested !!

    I have seen worse .. Using a spreadsheet to access a data base and doing all of the Queries in the spreadsheet .. Though not criminal, it should be !!

    1. Roland6 Silver badge

      > Using a spreadsheet to access a data base and doing all of the Queries in the spreadsheet ..

      ODBC data sources…

      The problem isn’t so much having the spreadsheet containing the SQL, but simply pulling whole tables back and then mangling them with Excel.

  17. Mockup1974

    Nothing wrong with Excel per se, but they really made some beginner's mistakes like hardcoding data, not building in checks everywhere, and letting more than ~5 people edit the file.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      It is the heritage of the initial version, running under Visicalc...

  18. Acrimonius

    Oracle/SAP plus Excel

    Not unheard of people with Oracle or SAP still extensively using Excel. So you pay an arm and a leg for an eternity, it fails the user expectations and Excel with its shotcomings is then still more useful.

    1. Roland6 Silver badge

      Re: Oracle/SAP plus Excel

      Well f you use QuickBooks - okay not same league as Oracle and SAP, your options are take the PDF reports it give you or export to Excel…

    2. Nick Ryan Silver badge

      Re: Oracle/SAP plus Excel

      Excel definitely has its uses... however extracting data from anything Oracle ("services", not Oracle SQL server in general but that's usually nasty enough) and in particular SAP will strain the sanity of anyone attempting it due to the batshit insane data structures in SAP and the junk that Oracle spews out to somehow prop up its "services".

  19. ecofeco Silver badge
    Facepalm

    When the CFO is a numpty

    I've seen similar in my travels. Wrong tools for the job and pikachu surprised faces when is goes to hell.

  20. TheSirFin

    One to send to Team New Zealand?

    Well worth a light-hearted, tongue in check read ... I read it every time Spreadsheets are brought up!

    https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-dropkick-you-if-you-use-that-spreadsheet/

  21. Jonathon Green
    Coat

    I can see why an `excel spreadsheet is a bad idea for this kind of thing…

    …it’s just that on the basis of every recent attempt at implementing ERP for large public bodies I’ve seen lately that doesn’t look like a better one.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: I can see why an `excel spreadsheet is a bad idea for this kind of thing…

      Spreadsheets or ERP, the ones you hear about are the ones that go wrong.

  22. DS999 Silver badge
    Trollface

    They've outgrown Excel?

    I guess it is time to upgrade to Quickbooks

  23. pdvr

    What Would DOGE Do?

    Sounds like exactly the kind of efficiency the whizzkids would come up with

  24. Kro--nos

    They needed TM1 - ADDIN for Excel (Now owned by IBM)

    Great deal of TM1 expertise in that part of the world.

    Users "think" they're using Excel.

    All the data is in cubes in server memory; business rules and calculations are kept in rules scripts; ETL from business sources is scripted and scheduled and any manual changes a user makes are restricted and logged.

    Consolidations are instant, One version of the truth!

    I never found anything better!

    IanB

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