Authors
Marton Sakal, Lazar Rakovic, Predrag Matkovic, Pere Tumbas, Veselin Pavlicevic
Abstract
Research results suggest that occurrence of errors in spreadsheets is a phenomenon that has been present constantly ever since spreadsheets entered into use. According to some claims, 95% of all spreadsheets used in business contain errors, which is often a cause of multimillion-dollar damages.
Users who develop spreadsheets have the necessary expertise in business analysis, accounting, financial planning or some other similar area, but lack specific IT knowledge.
After a concise overview of the interaction between spreadsheets and organizations' analytical culture, the paper briefly addresses the issue of overconfidence as a possible cause of errors in spreadsheets, which is followed by comparison of spreadsheet errors with errors inherent to activities that are involved in spreadsheet development (writing text and programming) and a presentation of frequency of errors in particular phases of the spreadsheet life cycle.
A brief explanation of why spreadsheet engineering proves to be a possible solution for reducing the number of spreadsheet errors is given at end.
Sample
The number of errors varies throughout the spreadsheet lifecycle.
Publication
2014, Conference on economics and management of innovative processes, projects, programs, November, Pages 202-206
Full article
Spreadsheets as a source of analytical and accounting problems
