It’s good to read articles like this one in Wall Street & Technology by Tim Clark. They give me hope that some day our data issues will be on track to be resolved. Primarily, this is because the big boys are now starting to look at how much they are spending on data. A lot of what they buy is duplicated across multiple vendors and there is no reason for this.

In our corner of the world, it amazes me that I can download a security master from Fidelity and one from Schwab and get different data. How many different prices does a security close at? So maybe, just maybe some of this efficiency will trickle down to us.

There is also a good hint in here for something we can all look into. It’s on Page 3 and it is something we are all guilty of. We need to rethink the spreadsheet. It generally goes something like this:

The assistant has some manual task to do like billing. They get tired of calculating it all manually. Since they know all the tricks of the PMS they create an extract from the PMS and import it into Excel. They just saved a ton of time by automating the billing system.

However, that assistant just created a problem. They are now the only one who knows that spreadsheet. If you want a good way to find out how bad this is in your office, go around and ask everybody to show you the worksheets they use to do their job. If none of this is documented then staff turnover can really hurt.

When I was brought in to consult for a mining company, one of the things they had me do was audit spreadsheets in the accounting department. I also needed to rank the risk of each spreadsheet to help the company prioritize. This was a department of 20 people, there were more than 1,000 spreadsheets!

You need to figure out what the spreadsheets are and prioritize them in some fashion. Then you need to either have them documented or replace them with some small web application or desktop application that is used internally. The better solution is to replace the spreadsheet with a small web application. This way any changes needed to the application are documented.

This may seem costly, but what if your assistant moves on and you find out next quarter that you don’t know how to bill your clients? Or when one of you clients calls and says you forgot to tell them about their Required Minimum Distribution.