Escaping Excel Hell: How to Operationalize Your Finances Without the "Dumb Tax"

Executive Summary

Every founder hits a wall where their financial operations break. The spreadsheets that worked at $1M revenue become a liability at $10M. Suddenly, you aren't analyzing data; you're just trying to fix it.

I brought on Gayle Nelson, Founder of Rapid Cloud Partners, to discuss how to bridge the gap between manual financial chaos and automated scale. Gayle brings a critical dual perspective: she is a tech expert with the heart of a Controller.

Here are the core financial insights from our discussion:

1. Excel is a Financial Liability Gayle shared a case study of a client running 24 separate instances of QuickBooks. This isn't just an operational headache; it's a financial risk. When your revenue recognition or fair value allocation lives in a spreadsheet, you are prone to manual errors that can trigger audit failures. The symptom is a month-end close that drags on for 10 days because your team is fighting the data rather than reporting on it.

2. The Two Killers of ROI When you invest in a system like NetSuite or Salesforce, two things threaten your Return on Investment:

• Scope Creep: The tendency to add "nice-to-haves" that blow the budget. Gayle’s advice: Push non-critical features to "Phase 2." Stabilize your core financial reporting first.

• The Devil is in the Data: You can buy the best ERP on the market, but if you migrate "sludge" (bad legacy data), your reports will be worthless. Data cleansing is the unsexy work that protects your P&L.

3. The "Implementation Committee" Do not let a new CFO clean house and hire a fresh team to build your new system. You need an "Implementation Committee" that includes your legacy employees—the ones who know where the bodies are buried in the ledger. If you ignore institutional knowledge, your new system will miss critical business logic.

4. The Psychological Barrier for CFOs I asked Gayle why decision-makers hesitate to pull the trigger on necessary upgrades. It is Reputation Risk. A new CFO fears that if the implementation fails, their name is attached to a massive, expensive disaster. The fix? A phased approach that proves value early without betting the farm.

The Bottom Line: You cannot scale a finance function in the trenches of Excel. Whether it’s automating documentation with AI or integrating your CRM with your GL, the goal is to stop manual entry so you can start strategic analysis.

Transcript for Search & Skimming

Below is the complete, searchable text of the interview. You can use the speaker tags to quickly search or skim the conversation for key insights on ERP implementation, avoiding scope creep, and the importance of data integrity.

Gayle Nelson: I'm Gayle Nelson, founder and president of Rapid Cloud Partners (RCP). We are a boutique professional services firm that helps our clients with NetSuite, Salesforce, and everything in between. As I say, we help our clients both domestic companies and global implement greenfield instances, which means from scratch, right, or to improve an instance they have to make something more efficient or scalable.

Um, and I got into this area of focus, I guess I'll say. I formerly worked at Ernst and Young, got my CPA, came up through the controller, VP of finance, director of finance ranks. Ultimately, uh, took on a pretty intense implementation of NetSuite prior, just after taking a company public, by the way. And so, uh, what a great ride and fell in love with the system, fell in love with implementations, fell in love with, uh, improvements, and just found that was my jam. So I, uh, from there went on to just take on more projects and like that, and ultimately left the company where I was to start the firm in 2019.

Randell Mauricio: I'm always interested to ask, what is the aha moment that leads you to think "I gotta do this for my own clients and my own company"?

Gayle Nelson: Oh my goodness. Um, I was, uh, involved at a, uh, after I left the company where I initially put in NetSuite, uh, I was involved with a different system implementation, a different company as an employee. And I remember the consulting group that we worked with. Very, very professional group. Highly thought of, very expensive. And I was just thinking, oh my gosh, we could do this so much better with such less waste, right? And, uh, so from there I was, uh, I was inspired, right? That to take it to the next level and go out and take my skillset, right? My accounting background, my systems background, my ability to organize things and communicate and drive sort of value for, um, our clients and helping them improve their systems.

Randell Mauricio: So let's dig in with that because you had just mentioned, you know, systems driving efficiency, driving scale. What are some of the challenges? What are the biggest challenges that you'll overcome right now with RCP?

Gayle Nelson: For me, myself, internally, or for our clients?

Randell Mauricio: Both.

Gayle Nelson: Oh, okay. For clients, what we typically find is, uh, you know, uh, they're expanding maybe globally, and so they have multiple instances of an ERP package, or, uh, loosely a GL package accounting package. And so consolidating the results becomes very, very challenging. They pull it out to their accountant's favorite tool, right? Excel. I love Excel, but it's not a great tool for reporting your financial statements. Um, and so, uh, typically there's an expansion, uh, that can happen or a startup company has gotten to a certain size and scale. They've gotten a new investment of money. And so now they can invest in building out that foundational system they need to grow. Uh, and so it's a pivotal point for them to a, select the right system, really select the right partner, right, and then also, uh, roll out a system that will be tailored to their needs and meet their design.

Randell Mauricio: Gayle, you know, a little bit about my business and, uh, in particular, I help founders, you know. Operationalize and install systems. That is the, the background of the history that you're talking about. You, you love systems and you have a, a wealth of knowledge in implementing them, but you can also, I'm sure you can also empathize and sympathize with other founders who have not done this before. Mm-hmm. What advice can you give them with, first off, recognizing that they need to change, and then afterwards recognizing where do they start?

Gayle Nelson: That's a great question. There are symptoms typically right within the business, within the reporting, within the accounting team. It could be, you know, your, your month end close is taking, you know, 10 days. Uh, it could be that you have, uh, team members spending an inordinate amount of time on manual processes, or you're keeping a lot of your accounting in Excel. "Oh, I've got a system, but I'm doing my revenue recognition, for instance, in Excel." Or I'm, you know, I've got multiple systems in my architecture that don't speak to each other. That's one of my, you know, key tenets of all of our implementations. We're not just putting in an ERP, we gotta think about all the systems in your, in your environment, and so that we can ensure that we can create a flow of data that's not only, uh, seamless, but also efficient to create accuracy. So there, there are various symptoms that are gonna lead to the fact that, hey, this could be beneficial. Um, and, uh, maybe it's the report they can't get that they want.

Randell Mauricio: Could, could you, uh, would you be a, uh, would you be able to share a case study or a use case or a success story I should say, of someone making that transition and, uh, you know, listening to those telltale signs, making a change in deploying automation or, or, or whatever the system may be.

Gayle Nelson: Yeah, sure. We had a, a, a recent, uh, go live, gosh, I think it was just a few months ago for a company. I think we'll be publishing that story soon. But, um, they had, I wanna say, two dozen instances of QuickBooks where they were caring for individual subsidiaries, financial statements, and activity and transactions in 24ish systems. Okay, so imagine you're entering a bill for one of your subsidiaries, and you've got to toggle between each instance. Obviously very, very inefficient. They also had different data like set up in each instance. So you know, when you go to combine those numbers after the fact of the chart of accounts or some of the other data isn't appropriately lined up, it's extremely cumbersome to do Excel. And what they found was they were having, you know, anomalies in their, uh, the roll up of the financials and that would take the accounting team an extra day to sort of just validate it and figure it out. So that was one primary example, another example we had most recently, and we're going live soon with them, is a company that has pretty robust revenue recognition needs. Uh, not only are they spreading, let's say an annual fee between date A and date B, but they might have something what's called fair value allocation, which is taking the total value of a contract and spreading it amongst different things that are sold on a contract. Okay? And they were maintaining this very complex, um, accounting in Excel and was finding that, guess what, when the auditors came in, errors, right? And it's 'cause it's in Excel. It's, it's very, not that you wouldn't have an error in a system, but it's much, much less likely. So a lot of manual errors, uh, translation, you know, picking up data from one system, moving it into Excel, uh, you know, manual mistakes. So another key solve there. Put it in a system, let the system do it.

Randell Mauricio: What about the key to implementation? Could you share any of that?

Gayle Nelson: Oh, okay. So this, I'm a big fan of Get Your A Players in each department that is relevant to the implementation. And put them on the engagement, backfill the positions if you need to, depending on how large scale the project is. A lot of times we can have those folks come, you know, 10, 20 hours a week for the duration of the project and they just need to supplement on the backend. Um, but, uh, it is important to have your A players. We also want a combination of, uh, people have been there for a while as well as fresh ideas. A lot of times a new CFO or controller will come in and like, "Oh, I'm gonna build a new system. I'm gonna hire all new people that I know," okay. And bring them to the project and let the everybody else just keep going with the work. It's a mistake. The people that have been there and have been doing the processes and built the systems, even, you know, as they've evolved over the years, typically know where the bodies are buried, right? And they know, you know, the, the gaps and the pain points that may not be apparent to somebody as, as new to the organization.

Randell Mauricio: That's interesting. What's coming to mind for me is implementation committee, and that could be totally off. Mm-hmm. But that's what I actually gather from that because you mentioned get your A players together or of course select A players, but also have a diversity in in, in perspective.

Gayle Nelson: A hundred percent. And we have a, you know, a very, uh, sort of standard approach to it. We have different roles that we ask you to fill an executive sponsor, for instance. This is someone within the organization that is overseeing the project and involved, but they're not gonna come to all the design sessions. They're not even gonna come every week to the status call. They're coming for the larger meetings and gonna chime in when there's a key design decision or something that needs to be resolved. Okay? Then you've got sort of the internal PM. You've got somebody that's in the day-to-day logistics, helping us break down barriers. We don't wanna go to 20 subject matter experts within your organization. It's highly inefficient. Take us through one PM internally, and then we have what we call the SME, the subject matter experts that come for each of their departmental areas. I don't want 20 people from the accounts payable department. I want one or two key people that can come and represent and they can go back to the team and gain alignment on key design decisions, right? Uh, and then come back with, with, with the decisions. So, uh, and then last but not least, of course, we need testers and other things, but, uh, having the right people in the right roles internally and hiring extra resource if you need it, is important.

Randell Mauricio: Regardless if it's Salesforce or NetSuite or, or maybe another tool implementation. It's any systems implementation. That's right. Correct. So, so let's spend a moment on the pitfalls or the landmines. What are the biggest landmines and potholes that you would suggest, uh, a business avoid?

Gayle Nelson: Ah, okay. I've got, uh, two big ones. One is, you know, it's very cliche, but scope creep, right? It happens every time, and I do my best to, you know, advise, "Hey, listen, let's put that off to phase two." If somebody brings up a new concept or a new idea, or we identify a use case in design that wasn't, you know, brought to the surface initially, that's gonna be. May be extremely challenging. It might not be part of what I call the 80/20—the majority of the cases, it's sort of not a one off, but less, less prevalent. Put it into phase two if we can handle it manually. Let's do that and deal with it later. Let's not sidetrack the whole project, spend abundant effect time and money doing it. So that's one of the first things. The second biggest thing that will sidetrack your project is data. I always say devils in the data, and I probably should write a post every week on devils in the data. I have a topic. Okay? But it is very, very true. You can design the best system in the world, and if the data is not ingested, cleansed, and ingested and maintained properly, your system won't work as designed.

Randell Mauricio: So where's the apex, Gayle? Because everything that you've shared, there's nothing I disagree with. But how does that, how do your insights apex with change management and the culture that the organization needs to have in order to receive and maintain everything that you've laid out today? Um, how do we help RCP? Yeah. How does my firm help? You know what, let me rephrase that question. Okay. What, what kind of culture? In, in your clients that you serve, what kind of culture do they mean to embody, to be able to take everything that you've shared with me today and actually deploy it with your team?

Gayle Nelson: Oh, very good question. Um, so we do have a variety of personalities that come to every project engagement, and it is a very interesting mix when you get there, right? Almost always in a project team. Some will bubble to the surface that you would not expect throughout the project, particularly in testing, and they just have an eye for this. They have an eye for systems and process, and they tend to come out in the end as sort of a, a leader in terms of, you know, championing the system after a go live. But, um, what I would say is being open to suggestions from those who have done it before. First of all, what we bring to the table is that, you know, I've done this before. My people have all done this before and, you know, the gray hairs in the room don't disappear after the sale. Um, I think that happens a lot with some larger firms. Uh, they, you know, tend to have the very knowledgeable folks come for the, uh, sale. And then maybe some less experienced folks take over and you don't get the product that you, you think you purchased. That's right.

Randell Mauricio: So we're in a world of automation and AI. How is the, the trend towards AI impacting your business and just generally how it's being received in the marketplace?

Gayle Nelson: Oh, AI is where it's at, right? Everyone's talking about AI. Everyone's looking for ways to incorporate it into their business. NetSuite is of course, you know, trying to embed AI within the system in areas that make sense. We personally use it a lot for documentation. Why charge a client extra time for us to spend, uh, you know, reviewing or building that content and refining it? Right? Let's put our base notes down. Let AI refine that documentation. Of course, review it to make sure it's accurate. 'Cause AI does have its own mind sometimes. Um, but certainly we're trying to refine our processes and our delivery methods to make it more efficient for our clients using AI.

Randell Mauricio: Gayle, final question for you, and I'll draw to a close with this question. Uh, what parting advice would you share with an organization who wants to scale? It doesn't know how to, knowing full well that you have the expertise to implement a system or systems that'll help 'em do so.

Gayle Nelson: Make the call, invest in that business process review whether it be, you know, with, with many companies, perform them, but honestly, just putting it down on paper sometimes brings everything to light. "Wow, I can't believe we've been doing X, Y, Z for so long, and such a manual, uh, method." So sort of having that review and and gathering of requirements is really valuable, I think, for the internal team as well as, uh, any SI that's gonna help them implement the system.

Randell Mauricio: Actually final, uh, follow up to that. Sure. Do you find that there's apprehension for that decision maker to make that leap? What is causing that barrier?

Gayle Nelson: I think within I, this is a great one, this, we see this a lot. You've got a new controller, a new CFO who's come into an organization and when they step forward and say, "Hey, I believe we need to move forward with this project. It's gonna be a transformational change for the business, and we need it because of X, Y, Z." It's their name and their brand essentially associated with that project. If something doesn't go right, they feel like they might be held accountable or it's associated with them. And so, uh, sometimes I think there's some reticence to come forward and do that. Let's let somebody else do that. Um, but, you know, true leaders stand up and, and, you know, do what's best. I think.

Randell Mauricio: Gayle, appreciate your time so much. Thank you for your insights.