Inside the Excel Estate: From Inventory to Understanding

Excel remains one of the most critical—and least understood—systems inside modern organizations.

Across insurance, finance, and advisory firms, spreadsheets power pricing models, financial reconciliations, reporting workflows, and operational decision-making. Over time, these files evolve, branch, and multiply. What starts as a single model becomes hundreds or thousands of variations spread across teams, shared drives, and inboxes.

The challenge isn’t that Excel exists.
The challenge is that most organizations are operating with an unmanaged Excel estate.

Why “inventory” doesn’t solve the problem

When teams set out to “get control of spreadsheets,” the first instinct is often inventory:

• Count the files

• Identify duplicates

• Track locations and owners

While this is a useful first step, it rarely answers the questions that matter most:

• Which spreadsheets are actually doing the same thing?

• Where did formulas change—and why?

• Which files introduce risk through hidden errors, VBA, or sensitive data?

• Which models should be governed, modernized, or retired?

Those answers don’t live in filenames or folder structures. They live inside the workbook.

Seeing spreadsheets as logic, not files

To truly understand an Excel estate, you have to treat spreadsheets less like documents and more like codebases.

That means looking at:

• Sheet structures

• Formula patterns and dependencies

• Tables and data flows

• VBA modules and macros

• Authorship, edits, and version lineage

This deeper analysis reveals something most teams intuitively know but struggle to prove:
many spreadsheets are not unique—they are variants of a small number of underlying models.

From chaos to clusters

One of the most powerful ways to make sense of large spreadsheet estates is clustering.

Rather than reviewing files one by one, related workbooks can be grouped automatically based on:

• Naming conventions and keywords

• Formula fingerprints

• Table structures

• Shared logic and patterns

For example, what initially appears as “50 pricing spreadsheets” often resolves into:

• A core pricing model

• Several closely related variants

• A handful of outliers that diverged over time

This shift—from thousands of individual files to a manageable set of model groups—fundamentally changes how teams scope remediation, governance, and modernization.

Understanding drift, divergence, and lineage

Spreadsheets evolve organically. They are copied, modified, emailed, and re-used—often without formal version control.

Over time, this leads to:

• Silent formula changes

• Inconsistent table ranges

• Branching logic paths

• Unclear ownership and accountability

By reconstructing lineage across versions, teams can see:

• Where a model originated

• When and where it diverged

• Which versions share common ancestry

• Which changes were isolated vs. widely propagated

This context is invaluable during audits, transformations, or acquisitions—especially when organizations need to understand not just what a model does, but how it got there.

Surfacing hidden risk before it matters

Many spreadsheet risks are not obvious during day-to-day use. They sit quietly until they surface as material issues.

Common examples include:

• Errors masked by broad IFERROR usage

• Range inconsistencies that grow silently over time

• Unmanaged or duplicated VBA macros

• Hard-coded credentials embedded in code

• Files containing sensitive or regulated data

When spreadsheet internals are analyzed systematically, these risks can be identified early—before they reach production processes, regulatory scrutiny, or financial reporting.

From insight to action

Understanding an Excel estate is not the end goal. It’s the starting point.

Once spreadsheets are clustered, analyzed, and prioritized, teams can make informed decisions:

• Some models should remain in Excel—but with governance, version control, and auditability

• Others should be modernized into APIs and integrated into enterprise systems

• Many can be rationalized, consolidated, or retired entirely

The key is that not every spreadsheet needs the same treatment. Insight enables choice.

Excel isn’t going away—and that’s okay

Excel continues to be one of the most powerful front-ends for complex business logic. The problem isn’t Excel itself. It’s operating without visibility, structure, or control at scale.

By treating spreadsheets as logic assets—rather than just files—organizations can move from reactive cleanup to intentional management.

And that’s when Excel stops being a liability and starts becoming an asset again.

See the Platform in Action

If Excel plays a critical role in how your organization prices risk, closes the books, or makes decisions, the first step isn’t replacement—it’s understanding.