Building a Costing System in a spreadsheet is like building a General Ledger system in spreadsheet.  You might be able to do it given enough time and resource, but why would you? 

Well, historically there were no software packages available in the market for IT costing, so organisations had little choice but to build their own.  But since the release of ClearCost, this reasoning is no longer valid.  The challenge for organisations who have already created spreadsheet and other bespoke systems is the unique customisation (not always a good thing) and ownership that the authors feel for these systems – and rightly so.  These are massively complex systems and to be able to generate costing data from them is a testimony to the skills and many months or years of development time that they typically attract.  Yet the fundamental concept of running a critical part of the business on a spreadsheet systems must be questioned. As good as spreadsheet is, the old adage of “horses for courses” applies.

Consider the differences between ClearCost and spreadsheets systems as we have commonly found them:

Attributes	ClearCost	Spreadsheet
20+ man years of development effort
Architected program design
Robust application in use across many organisations in different industry sectors
Key person dependency (what happens if that person leaves the organisation?)
Designed for multi-user access for data entry and maintenance
Extensive functionality to support data modelling for analytic purposes
Audit Trail of changes
Security control over data and functions being accessed
Integrity issues with the many formulas and linkages manually crafted and maintained
Fully documented
Central database model
Industry support for the specific application
On-going commitment of 3-4 man years per year on enhancements/development
Optional functions:
Integrated Contract Register
Integrated Capacity Costing system
Integration to General Ledger transaction data
Integration to CMDB asset data

If you are not convinced, consider the fact the cost of a single user license in ClearCost is equivalent to 4-6 weeks of Accountant or Developer time (and you wouldn’t build a costing and analysis system for that).  Spreadsheets are effectively a ‘single user’ solution (often too complex for the other ‘users’ of the information to work with).