URL: https://tispayments.com/blog/your-excel-spreadsheets-might-be-harming-your-cash-forecast/
Originally published on September 13, 2022
Whether you work at a mid-sized company or one of the Fortune 500, chances are that Microsoft Excel spreadsheets are part of your daily life. This remains true despite widespread innovation in financial software, as many treasury practitioners prefer the familiarity and customization that Excel affords.
But just how well do spreadsheets perform in this role? In many cases, the answer is “not well.” And in 2026, staying with spreadsheets not only mean accepting limitations, but also that teams are falling further behind as AI-powered cash forecasting becomes the competitive standard.
Security, Validation, & Auditability
Although it remains a common practice within treasury, managing cash forecasts in Excel often does more harm than good. This is because spreadsheets lack security, validation, and auditability. They also have little to no ability to extend forecast horizons. And finally, building a cash forecast with spreadsheets takes significant time and effort – and the ensuing data is often outdated by the time the process is complete.
Although the issues with spreadsheets are numerous, there are pressing challenges that points to the limitations of the tool:
In addition, Excel offers little support for extending the forecast horizon and requires significant time and effort to build, maintain, and update forecasts on a regular basis.
Modernizing treasury teams
Treasury teams are operating in a more volatile environment than at any point in the past decade. Trade policy uncertainty, currency volatility, geopolitical disruption, and shifting credit conditions are all creating pressure for more precise, more real-time cash visibility. Manual processes and static forecasting models simply can’t keep up with the pace at which conditions change.
Excel was never designed for any of this. It is a blank slate — powerful for what it was built for but fundamentally unsuited to the demands of modern treasury.
Spreadsheets & In-House Experts Have Their Limits
If your cash flow projection covers today to the end of the week, you may be able to get by using spreadsheets. But if, like most treasury teams, you want to have visibility and accuracy out to 90 days (or beyond), you simply can’t achieve this using Excel. The reason is simple: spreadsheets are not designed to scale up with the volume of data required to build a one-to-three-month forecast.
The harder you try — with multiple sheets, Excel models, macros and pivot tables — the higher the risk when the Excel wizard in your team decides to leave the company, taking their knowledge of your complicated spreadsheet with them.
The manual effort required to is simply staggering. We spoke with one treasury manager whose process is to copy and paste data from 130 spreadsheets into a single master file in order to begin putting the forecast together. The process takes three days, and the information is often outdated by the time this process is completed.
This is precisely what AI is designed to solve. According to AI in Treasury: Accuracy, Intelligence and the Future of Cash Forecasting, a EuroFinance Deep Dive supported by TIS, reducing manual effort was identified by 30.16% of respondents as one of the biggest constraints on improving forecasting accuracy and one that is bound to generate greatest potential impact. The time lost on manual and repetitive tasks is the time that AI could in principle reclaim. Moreover, manual processes are inherently more prone to error, which directly impacts the forecast accuracy.
Foundations That Matter
It would be dishonest to say switching from Excel to AI-enabled cash forecasting is simply a matter of choosing a platform. The most common mistake treasury teams make when approaching AI is treating it as a technology decision. They evaluate vendors, choose a platform, and then discover that the platform can only be as good as what feeds it. AI readiness isn’t primarily a technology problem — it’s a foundations problem.
- Data quality: This is the most fundamental issue in AI adoption for treasury — and the most frequently underestimated. Treasury teams often have a lot of data. What they frequently lack is data that is clean, connected, and structured in ways that AI models can use. Excel makes this problem worse by creating fragmented, inconsistent data that no AI model can reliably learn from.
- Skillset: The AI skills gap is consistently ranked as the biggest barrier to AI integration in enterprise organizations. But it’s worth being precise about what this means for treasury — because it isn’t primarily about technical skills. Most treasury teams don’t need to understand how to build machine learning models. They need to know how to evaluate outputs, understand limitations, and exercise judgment alongside AI recommendations.
- Governance: The trust dimension of AI adoption in treasury is frequently discussed but rarely acted on systematically. Audit or governance concerns continue to be one of the biggest barriers to trusting AI-generated cash forecasts. Governance — defining data boundaries, decision authorities, and audit requirements — must be in place before any AI capability is deployed at scale.
What Excel Can’t Be, and What AI Enables
The argument here is not simply that AI is better than Excel. It’s that the role of the treasurer has fundamentally changed — and Excel prevents treasury teams from meeting it. The treasurer’s role has been evolving for years, driven by increasing complexity in global payments, regulatory change, and growing executive demand for real-time financial visibility. AI accelerates that evolution rather than causing it.
Excel produces operational reporting. AI forecasting doesn’t just improve the numbers. It changes the conversation — from “what are our cash positions?” to “what should we do about them?”
How TIS Supports AI-Ready Treasury Teams
TIS’s AI-driven cash forecasting capability is designed around the principles of clean data inputs, transparent model outputs, human oversight built into the workflow, and continuous improvement. It’s forecasting designed for treasury teams that want to use AI actively — not just passively receive outputs. AI runs through TIS workflows and is deeply embedded into our platform, not as a separate module you must open. Treasury teams using TIS can move faster on AI adoption because the connectivity, data standardization, and bank integration layers that most organizations spend months building are already in place.
Ready to see what AI-ready cash forecasting looks like in practice? Book a demo with TIS to explore how our platform supports treasury teams at every stage of the AI readiness journey. Or download our 2026 guide: The Treasury Team’s Guide to AI-Ready Cash Forecasting.
