The High Opportunity Cost of Doing Excel Scutwork

Here’s how companies lose thousands of dollars per employee, per month by failing to upgrade their Excel workflows.

SUMMARY: Excel scutwork—manual Excel reporting—is a significant drain on your company’s time, talent, and strategic potential. It traps professionals stuck in low-value tasks that stall progress, bury insight, and burn out Excel users and their managers. This article shows you how to calculate the monthly cost of failing to eliminate Excel scutwork with an all-Excel strategy.

If your Excel team still updates reports the old way—manually, tediously, repeatedly—your company is quietly wasting a fortune.

Specifically: $5,000 to $15,000 per user, per month.

That’s not a wild estimate. It’s a hard-dollar calculation of the opportunity cost you pay by clinging to outdated, burnout-inducing Excel workflows. This is the most financially significant Excel Value Gap your company faces. I call it the Company Gap—and it’s the reason your Excel team looks busy, but delivers little.

For decades, there was no solution. And once the last piece of the puzzle was added to Excel, old habits were so deeply entrenched that few companies noticed the finished puzzle.

Your Monthly Excel Waste Audit

The following table puts real numbers to the Company Gap. Its calculations are simple:

• Line C: Start with fully loaded compensation.
  
  
• Line D: Apply the % of time spent on Excel scutwork. (The 85% is from Accenture.)
  
  
• Line E: Estimate the value of higher-impact Excel work users and managers could be doing instead time-wasting scutwork.
  
  
• Line F: Calculate the Gap using the formula = C × D × (1 + E)

As you can see, the value gap varies from about $5,000 to about $15,000 per employee, per month. And you can use the formula to test your own assumptions.

This Is Just the Beginning

The table above doesn’t include:

• The compounding gains from experience curves and learning curves, as explained in The Excel Insight Flywheel.
  
  
• The strategic uplift from using external business and economic data to add CONTEXT to internal performance.
  
  
• The resilience against turnover and knowledge loss—Flowbooks are structured, documented, and AI-explainable, making your reporting systems maintainable even if key team members leave.

Nor does it include the managerial cost of reviewing and correcting fragile Frankenbooks.

And it definitely doesn’t include the time it takes to recover when a broken formula delays a decision—or costs a customer.

So yes, the monthly cost of Excel scutwork is real. But it also understates the value of your company’s Value Gap.

This Isn’t About Speed. It’s About Value.

The EDP Strategy doesn’t just speed up reporting.

It replaces Excel drudgery with structured, automated, AI-enhanced work that scales—and adds value.

With Excel’s Power Query feature, Flowbooks update in seconds or minutes (depending on computer processing time). And because Flowbooks are structured, reflows become customizable, error-resistant, and instantly refreshable.

That’s not time saved. That’s time reinvested.

In a Shrinking Workforce, Waste Is the First to Go

CEOs now openly tout headcount reductions:

• Wells Fargo shrank 23% over five years
• Verizon says its headcount “is going down all the time”
• Amazon told staff that AI would lead to a smaller workforce

This shift reflects a broader trend: companies are no longer treating large workforces as strategic assets. Instead, they’re seeking smaller, leaner, more AI-aligned teams—and they’re proud to tell Wall Street about it.

In that context, Excel scutwork is more than inefficient. It’s indefensible. Low-value, high-expense labor is the first to go.

Companies that implement the EDP Strategy gain a measurable advantage:

• Leaner teams that do much more in much less time
• More accurate workflows supported by reusable Flowbooks
• Professional-quality reflows that support greater insight and strategic agility
• A workforce that partners with AI, not competes with it

In short, the EDP Strategy helps companies survive the efficiency mandate—and lead through it.

Managers: You Can’t Afford Not to Fix This

If your Excel users are still doing manual updates… If you’re still patching broken reports… If every month feels like a mad dash to meet deadlines…

Then you’re bleeding value. And it’s costing you $5K to $15K per Excel user, every month.

But there’s good news:

• The EDP Strategy eliminates that waste
• Your team gains brainwork time they’ve never had before
• You get better insight, faster
• And the business gets smarter every month

It’s not just an Excel upgrade. It’s a company-wide uplift.

Join the EDP Institute today. Stop the bleeding. Start the transformation.