You can do (almost) anything in Excel. Poet Brian Bilston even proved it’s an excellent tool for writing poetry. For years, Excel has been the go-to tool for many business functions—including audit, risk management, and compliance. However, more and more companies are realizing its limitations and switching to specialized solutions. While these tools might not be great for poetry, they significantly improve efficiency and simplify auditors’ work.
Excel was initially designed for accountants and analysts to perform calculations, manage budgets, and create reports. The earliest versions—branded as Multiplan—were released by Microsoft in 1982. The first official version of Microsoft Excel appeared in 1985 for Macintosh computers, followed by a Windows version in 1987.
Over time, as technology evolved, Excel became an all-purpose tool for various business processes, including audit. However, it was never meant to handle comprehensive risk management, audit, or compliance workflows. Using Excel for audit means manual work, no automation, and complicated access control. What’s more, its structure makes it challenging to track relationships between data, making risk management not just inconvenient but also… well, risky.
1. Access Control & Permissions = Security
Excel is an open-ended spreadsheet that anyone with a file can access. Sure, you can password-protect it or manage permissions in a cloud environment. Still, anyone in a large organization knows how tedious and error-prone this process can be when assigning and updating permissions.
Excel primarily stores data—often sensitive data. The risk of accidental edits, data leaks, or overwrites increases as more people access a file.
Modern tools designed for GRC processes eliminate these risks. AdaptiveGRC provides precise access control, ensuring full compliance with regulations like GDPR. Users only see the data they need, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access. On top of that, Excel doesn’t meet many information security requirements, such as confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA). It also lacks features required by regulations like CFR 21 Part 11 (FDA), PCI-DSS, or SOX. Solutions like AdaptiveGRC are built to meet these standards, eliminating compliance risks.
2. Tracking Changes & Progress
How do you check if someone made changes in an Excel file, and when and where? By manually comparing different file versions—an exhausting and time-consuming task.
AdaptiveGRC keeps an entire audit trail, showing who edited what and when. Plus, the system enforces data approval at key process stages. You can also track task statuses and user responsibilities, ensuring complete visibility over progress.
3. Workflow & Automatic Notifications
Audit is a complex process with many tasks spread over time and across departments. Coordinating all this while keeping track of deadlines can be overwhelming—even for experienced auditors. Excel offers no support in this area: it doesn’t send reminders about overdue tasks or enforce required actions.
AdaptiveGRC automatically notifies users about their assigned tasks and requires them to complete critical steps, ensuring transparency. The system streamlines risk, audit, and compliance workflows, automating task assignments and approvals.
4. Linking Data Across Processes
Effective risk management links audit results with risks, corrective actions, and their implementation. These relationships are crucial for a comprehensive approach. However, the inability to connect these elements in Excel is a significant limitation.
AdaptiveGRC integrates information across modules, making linking risks, audits, and corrective actions easy. The system provides a clear overview of relationships between data, improving analysis and decision-making. Users can quickly associate audit findings with identified risks and assign corrective actions—ensuring consistency and complete process control.
5. Handling Large Files & Data Validation
The bigger the organization, the harder it is to manage data in Excel. The tool isn’t built for large datasets. Its row (1,048,576) and column (16,384) limits can become problematic when handling complex GRC processes.
And the more data, the slower Excel gets. Large files lead to lagging, crashes, and even file corruption.
But it’s not just about quantity—data quality matters too. Excel doesn’t validate inputs, meaning users can enter incomplete, inconsistent, or incorrect data. A single typo or duplicate entry can corrupt entire reports.
AdaptiveGRC eliminates these issues with a database-driven architecture that ensures scalability and data validation. The system enforces consistency and accuracy, reducing errors and ensuring compliance with industry standards. This enables organizations to make decisions based on reliable, structured data—something that’s difficult to achieve in Excel.
6. Automated Reporting – No More Manual Data Compilation
Anyone who’s worked with Excel knows that creating reports is time-consuming. It requires manually gathering data, formatting tables, and preparing charts—often copying everything into separate files like PowerPoint presentations. With multiple spreadsheets and users, errors, inconsistencies, and outdated information are almost inevitable. Every update requires re-compiling and re-checking data, making reports obsolete almost as soon as they’re created. And even after all that effort, reports may still lack visual clarity and readability.
There’s a better way. AdaptiveGRC solves this with built-in reporting tools. The system automatically generates reports using the latest data, allowing quick filtering and analysis. Users can adjust report formats and data scope without manual file processing—keeping everything in a single, reliable source of truth. This saves time, eliminates human errors, and provides a real-time overview of audits, risks, and corrective actions.
