From our archive
We gave these sessions at the Global Excel Summit in February 2022, as Mazars. For our more recent work on model review, watch Financial model review pitfalls and how to avoid them.
We contributed a keynote session and a masterclass to the Global Excel Summit, sharing our experience of how to improve the quality of financial models.
Keynote: getting it right
Rickard Warnelid’s keynote looked at the process, culture and software needed for higher quality financial models.
Excel’s flexibility lets professionals build detailed financial models for complex investments, business cases and strategic plans. Many have built careers on constructing these models, and shared knowledge of best practice, modelling styles and templates has helped. Yet quality, complexity and lack of time pull against each other, and business-critical models and spreadsheets still contain significant errors that lead to misinformed decisions.
The session drew on our model development and model audit work around the world, with a focus on the processes, culture and software that raise model quality.
Masterclass: review techniques for model quality
Leigh Tomlinson’s masterclass made the case for a structured approach to reviewing spreadsheets and financial models, for any professional or organisation that uses Excel to support decisions. Our model audit team has audited more than 2,000 transaction models, and that work shows where errors most often sit. The session highlighted the risky areas of any spreadsheet or model and demonstrated techniques to find the issues.
It was for people who build models or complex spreadsheets and want a more systematic quality assurance process, and for those who lead a team whose modelling quality could improve.
- Typical errors and how to identify them
- When a commercial spreadsheet add-in is a good investment in quality
- The native Excel functionality that helps you find errors
- Dynamic stress testing that finds high-level errors without a cell-by-cell review