In the AI era, this decades-old program still has accountants’ hearts

As you may have heard, a little thing called Artificial Intelligence, or “AI,” is all the rage in accounting right now. AI will make accounting careers more enjoyable, the storyline goes, by automating manual drudgery and freeing up staff to perform (all together now) higher-value work.

But accountants aren’t ready to abandon their spreadsheets just yet. In fact, a recent survey from FP&A platform Datarails found that they have strong feelings about that 40-year-old workhorse of the finance function: Microsoft Excel.

A firm majority—82%—of the 212 US and UK finance professionals, including CFOs and accountants, who participated in the survey said they have a “high or moderate emotional attachment” to the software. Nearly half (45%) said they “love” Excel, while a similar proportion (43%) describe their relationship with it as “love-hate.” And more than half said they’d decline a job at a company where they couldn’t use Excel.

Trust is a big factor, according to Morgan Wilson, founder of creditte chartered accountants & advisors. Excel “shows what’s really happening without hiding behind dashboards,” Wilson told CFO Brew. “When a deadline is tight or someone wants an answer now, Excel is where the numbers get pulled apart, gut-checked, and tested against reality.”

Even Gen Zers and millennials are Excel fans. Nearly four in five (78%) Datarails respondents aged 22 to 35 said they’ve got a “high or moderate attachment” to the ’sheets.

But perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising. While it may be overstating things to say that Excel has a cult following, the software has many ardent proponents. Excel influencers (yes, it’s a thing) have racked up millions of views on social media, there’s an Excel World Championship that awards a belt Randy Savage would be proud to sport, and you can even propose to someone via Excel, if you’re so inclined.

Author and self-proclaimed “finance nerd” Katie Gatti Tassin, a longtime Morning Brew partner who until recently produced The Money With Katie Show podcast, describes Excel like an old, reliable, familiar friend. “It’s true that there are probably other software tools out there that could do what my Excel financial model does, but there’s something about that program—its total customizability and universality; most people know how to use it to some degree—that makes it feel like old faithful to me,” Gatti told us. “At this point, I’ve reached app fatigue, and I don’t want to have to download or learn new programs if I know Excel can get the job done.”

The majority (89%) of respondents to the Datarails survey said at least half their finance processes run through the software, and 99% said they spent at least three hours a day on it. Younger staff were particularly heavy users; 83% of Gen Zers and millennials said they were in Excel for more than five hours a day.

These spreadsheet aficionados in finance departments don’t see Excel becoming obsolete or getting replaced by AI any time soon. A healthy majority (84%) of CFOs agreed that “Excel will be equally or more important within the CFO’s office in the next 10 years.” (Data tables, after all, have been around for thousands of years, so what’s another decade?)