McNICHOLS’s manual quarterly budget process had become unmanageable. The manual method involved various MS
Access databases for different pieces of the budget and spreadsheets scattered throughout the organization. DePaolis
compared the former budgeting life cycle to an octopus with far-reaching tentacles. The body was an Access database and
the tentacles were Excel spreadsheets that reached throughout the organization’s districts that were tasked with
contributing daily sales data. The budget life cycle took weeks to manage, and given limited resources to handle it, the
company was in rush mode at the end of every quarter. Collecting sales data and moving it into other spreadsheets to feed into
Access was very cumbersome and required constant review
to ensure the accuracy of the data.