How to Turn Excel into a Cost Control Engine That Fuels Growth

SUMMARY: Growth and cost control aren’t opposing goals—they’re twin engines of high performance. By adopting an all-Excel strategy, with help from ChatGPT or Copilot, finance teams eliminate manual reporting and build scalable workbooks that automate updates and surface actionable insight. This approach mirrors Bain, BCG, and McKinsey’s advice: replace waste with capability; reinvest saved time into strategy; and use Excel to power smarter, faster decisions. Here’s an introduction to the new strategy.

You’d think doing something over and over would make you faster at it.

Companies want profitable growth. CFOs want cost discipline. But few believe that Excel can help them do both—if used the right way.

That doubt is outdated—and costly.

According to Bain & Company, top-performing companies reject the idea that they have to choose between growth and efficiency. They pursue both. In fact, Bain says business leaders design operating models and incentives that drive cost-efficiency and enable faster, more focused growth.

The goal isn’t to reduce cost for its own sake. It’s to create the room to reinvest in what works.

That message echoes across multiple strategy consultants. BCG emphasizes that lasting value comes from capability-building, not one-time cuts. McKinsey argues that cost savings only matter when they’re linked directly to business value. All three agree: high performance requires disciplined, transparent, and scalable operations.

For finance leaders, that means one thing: it’s time to scale insight—not effort.

Why Finance Is Stuck in the Wrong Tradeoff

Finance teams want to deliver more value. But many are still drowning in Excel scutwork. Updating forecasts, creating variance reports, refreshing dashboards—much of it is done manually. The result? Hours of labor just to get to a starting point.

When companies demand more insight, more scenarios, more agility, their finance departments feel forced to grow headcount. But that just multiplies cost and complexity.

Instead of scaling insight, most companies scale effort.

Bain’s ZBR (Zero-Based Redesign) research explains what should happen instead. Companies should “treat cost not as an obstacle to growth, but as its enabler” and reinvest what they save into digital capabilities, data, and analytics. That includes finance.

Zero-Based Strategies Across the Business

A good example of this in action is an organization that identified $100 million in potential savings by applying ZBR across its SG&A functions. They didn’t simply cut—they reset budgets from zero and rebuilt spending plans aligned with strategic priorities. The company redirected those funds into tech upgrades and customer experience initiatives, enabling both margin expansion and revenue growth.

The same principle applies outside of Finance. In Bain’s work with a consumer goods company, ZBR was used to evaluate trade promotion spending. Instead of relying on last year’s spending as the baseline, the company asked: what should we be spending, and where? By using data to reassess which promotions actually drove volume—and which didn’t—they cut low-ROI promotions and reinvested in fewer, more effective ones. Sales went up. Costs came down.

In supply chain operations, Bain also worked with a global manufacturer that applied ZBR to supplier management. Rather than basing supplier budgets on historical spending, the company re-examined how much each material input should cost—based on specifications, market benchmarks, and value to the business. They discovered significant pricing discrepancies across regions and categories. Armed with new cost baselines, the company renegotiated contracts and streamlined SKUs. Inventory turnover improved. Input costs dropped. Working capital freed up.

That’s the kind of operational analysis Excel Data Plumbers can support.

With a flowbook, supply chain teams can link purchase order history, vendor pricing data, and SKU-level performance. They can flag cost anomalies, visualize spend trends by category, and simulate savings from SKU rationalization. The reflows keep everything current, so when negotiations or planning cycles start, the team already has the insight they need.

How to Turn Excel Into a Cost Control Engine That Fuels Growth

This is where the Excel Data Plumbing Strategy changes the game.

It’s not a tool. It’s a strategy for turning the most widely used financial platform—Excel—into a scalable, insight-ready system.

At most companies, Excel workbooks grow like weeds. They’re inconsistent, manual, fragile, and siloed. No one can update them quickly or reliably. Reporting takes days. Forecasts lag. Analysts are stuck cleaning data instead of advising leadership.

Excel Data Plumbing—with help from ChatGPT or Copilot—replaces that chaos with structure.

Finance teams build flowbooks—standardized Excel workbooks powered by Power Query. These flowbooks connect to internal and external data sources, clean and transform data automatically, and feed it into dashboards, models, forecasts, and reports.

When data changes, users just hit Refresh All. Within seconds, the entire flowbook updates. Charts, tables, ratios, KPIs—all current. No reformatting. No rechecking formulas. No errors from copy-pasting.

That’s what we call a reflow: an automatically refreshed Excel output.

The Impact on Cost and Growth

This topic matters for CFOs because it delivers exactly what Bain, BCG, and McKinsey recommend.

Bain calls for operating models that eliminate low-value activities and redeploy resources. Flowbooks do exactly that. They eliminate manual report-building and free up analysts to work on what matters.

BCG’s Gideon Walter says, “Sustainable cost management is not about one-off savings—it’s about building the organizational muscle to manage costs in good times and bad.”

Excel Data Plumbers build that muscle. Their teams gain the capability to produce more insight with less effort. They don’t scale by adding people—they scale by removing friction.

McKinsey’s work on cloud cost optimization underscores the point: “Tech cost savings become real only when finance and business leaders link them to value.”

Plumbers make that linkage. By streamlining internal reporting, they create time for deeper analysis, scenario planning, and faster decision-making. The cost savings are real. But the value is what teams do with that time.

A Real-World Example: Scalable Forecasting

Imagine your team builds a monthly cash flow forecast.

The traditional approach involves downloading GL data, fixing format issues, adjusting for timing, updating charts, rechecking formulas, and sending the file to managers for review. Repeat every four weeks.

With a flowbook, that entire pipeline runs automatically. GL data is linked. Adjustments are parameterized. Charts are auto-updating. When the data changes, the report does as well.

The time saved isn’t just a bonus—it’s strategic capital.

Now the analyst who built the forecast can also explore what-if scenarios, model working capital impacts, or test a rolling 13-week variant. They can brief leadership, respond to questions faster, and adapt the model as assumptions change.

That’s how you scale.

A Culture Shift—Not Just a Technical One

The Excel Brainwork Strategy does more than automate. It changes how finance works.

Teams stop firefighting. They start designing. Instead of being consumers of data, they become architects of insight.

That mindset shift supports the long-term cultural change that BCG advocates: aligning people, incentives, and systems to continuously manage cost and performance.

And because the strategy uses Excel and Power Query—tools already familiar to many operating departments—it doesn’t require a risky tech overhaul. You don’t need to wait for IT. You don’t need to retrain your entire staff. You just need structure, strategy, and the discipline to build flowbooks instead of the ad hoc workbooks dictated by the Excel Scutwork Strategy.

Why It Works Now

This strategy wouldn’t have worked ten years ago. Power Query was too new. AI tools weren’t available to help fill skill gaps. But now, even modest-sized teams can implement the strategy with the help of AI tools like ChatGPT and built-in Excel tools.

As McKinsey, Bain, and BCG each make clear, the growth challenge facing today’s CFOs isn’t just about numbers. It’s about capability, agility, and reinvestment.

Excel Data Plumbing delivers on all three—to deliver jaw-dropping new value to their employers.

You won’t need more analysts. You’ll face fewer bottlenecks. And you’ll finally have the structure to turn time into value.

Excel scutwork or brainwork? It’s your choice.

Fuel growth and slash waste—start building your Excel cost control engine now. Join the EDP Institute today.