Risk Calculator Add-in for Excel

“A very interesting piece of work that could have a real impact on the community. It will be interesting to see what impact this could have on the spreadsheet auditing community. Well done!”
– Dr Simon Thorne

Abstract

Being the most used end-user computing application in business, Spreadsheets’ heavy use can encounter many potential risks such as errors, ambiguity, data loss, duplication, and fraud. In this research these main risks were initially discussed along with their available mitigation methods such as spreadsheets documentation, centralisation, auditing, and users’ training. However, because of the large quantities of spreadsheets used in organisations, applying these methods on all sheets is impossible. This fact is considered as a gap in these methods, for which an experimentation research was conducted to bridge. Building an inventory of all critical spreadsheets has long been an essential requirement in many legislations and managerial international standards. However, the huge effort and time it requires has formed an obstacle that prevented many organisations from complying with such standards. In this research, a new software tool, for managing spreadsheets and identifying the risk levels they include, has been developed and tested. As an add-in for Microsoft Excel application, ‘Risk Calculator’ can automatically collect and record spreadsheets properties in a special database, and assign risk scores to each one of them based on its importance, use, and complexity. Consequently, further auditing processes can be applied on the high risk sheets only. Such a method saves much time, effort, and money, and can be considered as bridging the gap in the other risk mitigation methods. Interestingly, the developed tool has pushed the door wide open for further analysis and research fields, even beyond the scope of the original research.