Services
Spreadsheets are essentially user-developed applications, and as such are extremely prone to error and fraud. Finding and diagnosing problems or assessing the risk of fraud is a challenge as Excel does not provide an adequate set of capabilities for this.
We can provide you with design guidance and detailed analytical reports of your spreadsheets, highlighting suspicious documents and pinpointing areas that require remediation. With our rule-based technology we are even able to detect spreadsheets that break your company standards. This will help guard your organisation against the introduction of new spreadsheet errors.
Spreadsheet Inventory
Firstly, we are able to rapidly scan and analyze many thousands of spreadsheets and catalogue them. Indeed, this inventory process is required by legislation such as Sarbanes Oxley. In our experience clients drastically under-estimate the quantity and complexity of spreadsheets used in their organisation.
Example Capabilities:
- Scan hard disks, individual folders, portable or network drives; providing a detailed report of detected spreadsheets
- Flexible report configuration. For instance filter by spreadsheet author, formula count, existence of VBA Macros, Named Ranges, Excel errors, hidden sheets and more
- Analyse workbook protected spreadsheets, even those that have password protected VBA Projects
- Apply any of your company spreadsheet standards against detected spreadsheets using our rules engine. For instance, ensure your company name is present at a particular cell location or that no spreadsheet contains more than 10,000 formulae
- Use regular expressions to detect patterns such as credit card numbers, websites and social security numbers
- Store a snapshot of detected spreadsheets that can be used in the future for comparison reports. This allows us to quickly compare the attributes of spreadsheets over regular periods
Deep Dive Analysis
Secondly, we are able to forensically analyse individual spreadsheets, providing recommendations and exposing suspicious attributes of the document.
Example Capabilities:
- Detailed formula analysis, such as highlighting copy/paste errors, unused values, suspicious ranges, text and empty cell references
- Analysis of hidden cell references, such as cells hidden by images, conditional formatting or matching foreground/background colours
- Highlighting unusual attributes, such as "very hidden sheets", auto-start VBA macros, duplicate named ranges and manual Excel calculation
- External links/references report
- Worksheet inter-dependency analysis
- Detailed cell-level documentation
- Spreadsheet comparison, showing differences between previous versions
- VBA Macro investigation
- Spreadsheet mapping, revealing all input, output and combined input/output cells.
- Detection of hard coded values, negative/positive formulas and numerics formatted as text
