Enterprise systems, Excel reality

"Do not worry, we have got enterprise systems. Scale and flexibility will not be a problem." That is great, but most of the work happens in Excel.

We are currently helping the acquirer of a business where the core systems look solid. Proper ERP. Proper finance platform. The right logos in the stack.

Scratch the surface and the operational reality is different. Clients are in the ERP but orders are in Excel. Stock is managed in Excel, then copied to the ERP for good measure. Orders live "somewhere". Reporting is stitched together manually. Finance lives in the finance system, staff benefits live in another spreadsheet. There are even Excel sheets tracking other Excel sheets.

Nothing is technically broken. The business still operates and has done so for many years. But ask for consolidated reporting and it takes days. Ask for a targeted campaign and it becomes a four-day manual exercise. Ask how a new service line would be merged in and you start to see where the real constraints are. The enterprise stack is doing perhaps a third of the work it was bought to do, and the rest is being held together by a small number of long-serving people who have quietly become indispensable.

The systems may be enterprise-grade. That is not where the work is being done. When most of the operational glue lives in spreadsheets, scale moves at the pace of manual copy and paste.

For an acquirer, that gap matters. The investment case usually assumes the systems on the page. The operating reality is what you actually inherit on day one.