$10B Annual Tab for Spreadsheet Errors?

theodp writes "According to PWC and KPMG, more than 90% of corporate spreadsheets have material errors in them. With each error costing between $10K and 100K per month, one expert estimates corporate America loses in excess of $10B annually through the misuse and abuse of spreadsheets." From the article: "The key point about spreadsheets is that you need to know which ones are critical to your business, which ones are merely important and which ones you do not have to bother too much about. Once you know that, you can start to apply appropriate policies depending on the criticality of the spreadsheet involved."

Oh wait

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a $10 Annual Tab for Spreadsheet Errors. Misplaced a decimal!

How did they work this out?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they run the numbers through a spreadsheet?

Re:Other Losses?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh this makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. Lets build a bureaucracy around spreadsheets.

Spreadsheet requirements gathering - 2 weeks
Spreadsheet Use Cases - 1 week...

Sorry sir you can't use a spreadsheet to organize your pencil collection until next month because IT needs to make quarter numbers and cut expenses.

Re:Does anyone understand this?

[Creepy Crawler]

So what you imply is we should overcharge on EVERYTHING and hope the people we're selling XYZ to catches it.

As long as we make mistakes, in OUR BENEFIT, we're ok, right?

Re:Ummm

[sphealey]

This is probably just another case where some statistician takes a common problem, makes a few guesses, and comes up with some exorbenant figure to scare people into paying attention. You can support any point with statistics.

Not to mention that he probably used a spreadsheet to calculate those statistics...

sPh

Re:spreadsheets are insanely useful

[shutdown -p now]

In other words, the major factor in your switch is your laziness to google for perl+windows [google.com]?

Article Has Spreadsheet Error

[rewinn]

>... $165,000 times 9 times 500. That amounts to just shy of three quarters of a billion dollars. And is that anywhere near realistic? No. It is probably safe to say that corporate America, for example, loses in excess of $10bn annually ...

Can You Spot The Spreadsheet Error?

Cell B1 = $165,000
Cell B2 = 9
Cell B3 = 500
Cell B4 = B1*B2*B3
Cell B5 = $10 BILLION

Re:Does anyone understand this?

[ExileOnHoth]

Yes, this makes complete sense, because, you see, 87% of all statistics are made up.

Re:Ummm

[Moofie]

Except in this case, they're trying to scare people into paying KPMG to make them more spreadsheets.

And I guarantee that getting KPMG to make errors for you is going to cost you more than $10 grand.

Re:Does anyone understand this?

[aichpvee]

You must be new to corporate america.