Excel Applications
Harry Cendrowski, William C. Mair · 2012
Defective Excel applications can cause far more damage than their appearance would threaten. Some major public financial restatements have been attributed to a simple error in some not-so-simple Excel file. At the same time, Excel files are so ubiquitous that corralling and taming them is a formidable challenge. Excel applications are not under the effective control of the professional IT department, and users are prone to mistakes that professional IT personnel are trained to avoid. One cannot turn every Excel user into a professional programmer, but one can educate the organization to apply and use controls that will dramatically reduce the risk of material misstatements and other costly errors. This chapter highlights the numerous common errors that one can come across while constructing the quantitative models in Excel. It also discusses various facets of quantitative risk assessment model including interdependent systems.