5 of the Most Horrifying 2023 Spreadsheet Blunders

Spreadsheets are amazing tools—until a company's review process fails. Read about a few businesses that should have known they had other options.


We’re willing to bet you’ll find at least one spreadsheet on every office computer in the United States. They’re easy to use and feel familiar to most people. Those qualities make the software incredibly helpful for performing simple data-tracking tasks and managing small organizations. Still, this simplicity can be deceptive and cause costly mistakes.

 

For example, spreadsheets require a lot of manual entry, which leads to human error. In fact, the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group reports that more than 90% contain errors—a horrifying statistic for most businesses. Incorrect data can create significant problems for organizations, causing them to lose millions and even billions of dollars.

 

We know your company can’t afford small mistakes that carry massive consequences. A NetSuite Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system offers advanced database software that reduces manual labor for businesses selling goods and services. Its automation capabilities increase accuracy so operations can run smoothly. 

 

Read some of the most significant spreadsheet horror stories from 2023, and then schedule a free NetSuite demonstration with SuiteDynamics experts. Our team will help your company upgrade its software so it can enjoy secure, accurate data that fuels expansion. 


Schedule a FREE Demo
Graphic stating that 90% of spreadsheets contain errors.


5 Cringeworthy Spreadsheet Horror Stories From 2023

 

No matter how diligent we are, mistakes will always happen—especially on spreadsheets. The following stories have appeared in the news throughout 2023, chronicling some of the world’s most consequential spreadsheet errors. 

 

1. Royal College of Anaesthetists Accidentally Rejects All Welsh Candidates


UK’s Anaesthetic National Recruitment Office (ANRO) informed anesthetist candidates seeking specialist training positions in Wales that they were “unappointable,” even though some had high scores. As it turns out, the organization combined differently formatted spreadsheets, confusing candidates’ ranks with their interview scores. 


The incident left Dr. Richard Marks, former NHS consultant anesthetist and former vice president of the Royal College, scratching his head. 


“I'm no expert on HR software, but I do know that manually copying and pasting from seven different Excel sheets, all laid out in different ways, is bound to go wrong one day,” he observed. “So, who set up the system? Who set up the QA processes and the staff training?"


Source: Global Financial Market Review


2.  Austrian Political Party Announces Election Winner—and Then Takes It Back


This one’s a gem. A prominent opposition party in Austrian politics had to walk back its leadership election results in June 2023. It had announced the wrong winner after a staff member bungled a spreadsheet. 


“Unfortunately, the paper ballots did not match the result that was announced digitally,” Michaela Grubesa, head of the electoral commission, stated at a news conference. “Due to a colleague’s technical error in the Excel list, the result was mixed up.”


Source: The Washington Post


3.  Lucky Bourbon Lovers Profit From Lottery Glitch


A few bourbon fans in Virginia struck gold after a spreadsheet error allowed them to win multiple prize whiskeys. 


Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority officials stated that “a breakdown in Excel sorting” allowed a few lottery participants to win more than one bottle, even though more than 40,000 people had entered. After many disgruntled people complained, officials solved the problem by choosing winners through automation.


Source: The Virginia Mercury

 

4.  Virginian Schools Get $200 Million Less Than Expected


This is one of the sadder spreadsheet horror stories on this list. Human error caused an interactive spreadsheet in Virginia to give schools higher budget estimates than they should have received. In fact, these numbers exceeded the actual budget by $200 million. 


The issue could cause increased class sizes, elimination of supplemental instruction programs, supply decreases, and maintenance delays. State officials plan to make up the difference and keep schools from experiencing budget shortfalls. 


Source: EducationWeek


5.  $400,000 Budget Shortfall Sends Library Into Chaos


The leadership in charge of an ImagineIF Library construction project in Bigfork, Montana, had a terrible day when they realized someone had used an old number. The error contributed to a $400,000 budgeting shortfall. To compensate, ImagineIF Library Foundation Director Sara Busse and other planners combed the budget, looking for areas to cut costs. 


“It's the cost of building in today's market right now — that's what we're realizing,” Busse said. “So, we'll figure it out; that's our work.”


Source: Daily Inter Lake


A NetSuite ERP system can help avoid embarrassing and costly errors if your company deals in goods and services. Schedule a free demonstration with SuiteDynamics experts and discover how smoothly your business can run. 


Schedule a FREE Demo
Graphic stating that roughly 50% of spreadsheet models that large businesses use operationally have material defects.


3 of the Most Significant Spreadsheet Problems in Recent Years


Spreadsheet troubles have plagued companies for decades. Below are a few of the major issues that have arisen since 2012. 


1.  Faulty Value at Risk Model Causes $6 Billion Loss


JPMorgan Chase & Co. suffered a $6 billion-plus trading loss in 2012 partly due to spreadsheet errors in a Value at Risk model. To create the model, office workers had to copy and paste information manually from multiple spreadsheets, resulting in errors. 


The incident caused Alex Hern, tech writer for The New Statesmen, to ask, “Is Excel the most dangerous piece of software in the world?”


Source: Forbes


2. 16,000 COVID-19 Case Details Disappear


In 2020, Public Health England (PHE) failed to report 16,000 COVID-19 cases due to a spreadsheet formatting failure. Unfortunately, PHE developers uploaded data onto an old file format that could only hold 65,000 spreadsheet rows. Each test result used multiple rows, so it stopped once the loading information hit the format’s max capacity. The rest of the cases were left off the file. 

 

"Excel was always meant for people mucking around with a bunch of data for their small company to see what it looked like," University of Cambridge professor Jon Crowcroft told the BBC. "And then when you need to do something more serious, you build something bespoke that works - there's dozens of other things you could do.”


Source: BBC News

 

3.  Scientists Rename Genes to Thwart Excel Autocorrect


In 2020, scientists renamed 27 human genes. Why? Because Microsoft Excel kept autocorrecting them into dates. Scientists used alphanumeric codes to help track tens of thousands of genes. Therefore, they would input MARCH1 for “Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1,” and the spreadsheet would correct it to 1-Mar, corrupting the data. One 2016 BMC study examined genetic data shared alongside more than 3,500 papers and discovered that spreadsheet errors impacted roughly 20%. 

 

Microsoft has since updated its software, allowing Windows and macOS users to turn off automatic data conversion. 


Sources: The Verge, BMC



We know no company or organization wants to end up on this list. Fortunately, yours can avoid spreadsheet humiliation with careful review processes, attention to detail, and the right software. NetSuite ERP systems help companies track customer, product, and service data efficiently. They also automate processes and eliminate the need for clunky copy and pasting, reducing the risk of human error. The software helps keep your information correct and your reputation stellar. 


SuiteDynamics experts can customize and implement a NetSuite ERP that meets your company’s most unique needs and equips it to meet the highest of goals. Schedule a free demo today and feel more secure about the data your business depends on. 


Schedule a FREE Demo


Blow Away the Competition


Stop fighting a software system that's working against you. Instead, enjoy the benefits of an ERP that knits your operations together seamlessly and provides the data and analysis you need to trounce your competition. 


We know you can rise in your industry. 


So, team up with SuiteDynamics to develop the ERP system your business needs. As a NetSuite Alliance Partner, we customize and implement NetSuite ERP software for clients in any industry. 


And the partnership doesn't stop there. We can work with you long after go-live, maintaining the system, training staff, and adjusting the software to accommodate your expansion. Start by contacting us for a free consultation. 


Schedule a Consultation
Headshot of Grace Martin

Grace Martin is the Principal Finance Consultant at SuiteDynamics and possesses a unique dual expertise in both technology and finance. Her extensive experience spans virtually every financial position from auditor to CFO, complemented by her management of IT departments and leadership of multiple system implementations. She also spent nine years as a contract accountant and systems analyst for major manufacturing plants and ten years as Director of Finance and Management Information Systems at Dippin Dots, with roles as Controller and Global Cost and Pricing Analyst at Siemens Rail. At SuiteDynamics, Grace specializes in developing custom financial solutions that enhance native NetSuite functionality, with a personal focus on understanding client financial needs and ensuring correct GL impact for reporting. 

Why Make-to-Order Manufacturing Breaks Down in Spreadsheets

March 27, 2026
Spreadsheets built modern business. For decades they served as the unofficial operating system of job shops and custom manufacturers everywhere. They are flexible, familiar, and just comfortable enough to feel like a real solution. In the early days of a growing shop, they genuinely work. But as make-to-order complexity increases, as custom BOMs multiply, lead times tighten, and engineering revisions pile up, spreadsheets strain under the pressure. Every job is different, but spreadsheets want everything to be the same. In make-to-order environments, no two jobs are identical. Unique BOMs, custom routings, variable material costs, different setup requirements, customer-specific specs. Spreadsheets, though, thrive on repetition and standardized rows. So the more variation you introduce, the more tabs you create. The more exceptions you add, the more manual overrides appear. The more formulas you patch together, the more fragile the whole thing becomes. Eventually, the file turns into something only one person truly understands. That’s a liability, not a system. Capacity becomes a guessing game. In make-to-order shops, capacity isn’t theoretical. It’s constrained by reality. Machines go down. Operators vary in skill. Setup time fluctuates from job to job. Rush orders blow up carefully planned weeks. Spreadsheets struggle here because they’re built on static inputs. You can build a beautiful planning sheet with machine-hour allocations, but unless it dynamically adjusts for real-time job status, operator availability, overlapping resource conflicts, and maintenance downtime, you’re not really planning. You’re forecasting best-case scenarios. And that’s exactly how shops overpromise delivery dates and end up paying for it later in overtime and expediting costs. Engineering changes don’t cascade cleanly. Change is a constant in make-to-order manufacturing. A customer tweaks a dimension, a material substitution becomes necessary, or a tolerance tightens halfway through production. In an integrated system, that change automatically updates BOMs, routings, cost projections, and scheduling impact all at once. In a spreadsheet environment, it depends entirely on who remembers to update which tab. A routing might change without adjusting the labor estimate. A material substitution might never feed into the margin calculation. A lead-time adjustment might not reach the production schedule until it’s too late. These small disconnects multiply quickly, and because spreadsheets have no enforced relationships between data sets, the errors don’t announce themselves. Institutional knowledge becomes a single point of failure. Ask most growing job shops who owns the master spreadsheet and you’ll get a name. One estimator, planner, or operations manager who has become the living interpreter of years’ worth of embedded formulas, assumptions, and logic that nobody else fully understands. This works fine until it doesn’t. When that person goes on vacation, gets sick, or leaves, the shop loses operational clarity. In an environment already defined by complexity, having critical knowledge live inside one person’s mental model of a file is an inefficient bottleneck. Visibility stops at the file boundary. Spreadsheets are static snapshots. Make-to-order manufacturing is anything but. Without real-time feedback loops, shops find themselves unable to answer questions that should be simple: Are we actually on track this week? Which jobs are consuming more labor than quoted? Where is the bottleneck right now? Which customers consistently drive margin compression? When performance data doesn’t flow automatically from the floor back into quoting and planning, improvement stalls. You can’t refine what you can’t see. Here’s the thing about spreadsheet failure in manufacturing… it’s not dramatic. It’s gradual. First the files get slow, then fragile, then opaque. By the time leadership feels the real pain through late shipments, squeezed margins, and rising overtime, the architectural issues are widespread. Make-to-order manufacturing demands systems that understand relationships: how a routing affects capacity, how a BOM revision affects cost, how a delayed job cascades through the rest of the schedule. The question most shops ask is whether they can make the spreadsheets work. The better question is what it’s actually costing to keep them. The most resilient make-to-order manufacturers are building systems that preserve flexibility without sacrificing the visibility needed to actually run the business. Adaptability is the advantage. 

Where Fabrication Shops Lose Margin (And Don’t Know It)

March 23, 2026
In custom manufacturing , when systems break down, profit rarely disappears all at once. It leaks. Quietly, repeatedly, and often in ways that never show up clearly on any report. Walk into almost any fabrication shop and you’ll hear some version of the same story: the backlog is strong, revenue looks good, we’re staying busy. And yet the margin feels thinner than it should. For job shops running custom work, profitability doesn’t usually collapse because of one bad decision. It erodes through small, daily inefficiencies buried inside quoting, scheduling, engineering changes, and the gap between what was planned and what actually happened on the floor. Here’s where shops most commonly lose efficiency, and how to get it back. The quote that was almost right. For custom orders, every quote is a prediction, and predictions are dangerous when they’re disconnected from real shop-floor data. Outdated labor standards, underestimated setup time, material prices that changed since the template was built, and capacity assumptions based on average weeks instead of current reality. These errors are each small on their own, but a 4% underestimate on labor here, a missed secondary operation there, add up across hundreds of jobs. Small errors compound into real margin loss. The best-performing shops treat quoting as a living system fed by actual job performance data, not static spreadsheets that nobody updates. Capacity that looks available but isn’t. On paper, there’s open space on the schedule. In practice, that open week includes a machine down for maintenance, a senior operator on vacation, two complex jobs already competing for the same bottleneck, and a rush order someone verbally committed to last Thursday. Without finite capacity planning, shops routinely overcommit based on theoretical machine hours rather than real-world constraints. The fallout is predictable: overtime spikes, expedited shipping costs, re-sequencing chaos, and exhausted operators. Margin shrinks not because the shop is incapable, but because it’s planning in averages. Engineering changes that never get repriced. Designs evolve. A hole moves, a weld spec changes, or a tolerance tightens. Each adjustment has a cost. But many shops hesitate to reprice midstream, worried about damaging the customer relationship, and end up absorbing the extra labor and rework time instead. Do this enough times and it becomes a cultural norm: “we’ll just take care of it.” That’s margin erosion disguised as good service. High-performing job shops track engineering change impact in real time and make repricing decisions based on data rather than discomfort. Setup time hiding in plain sight. In low-volume, high-mix environments, setup time is often the silent killer. When shops don’t track setup separately from run time, assume it’ll all come out in the wash, and never refine their routings based on what actually happened, they end up underpricing complexity. In job shops producing one to fifty unit runs, setup can represent a disproportionate share of total labor. If it isn’t measured accurately, it can’t be priced accurately. The spreadsheet layer nobody talks about. Most shops run a hybrid environment where the ERP handles transactions and spreadsheets handle reality. Capacity lives in one file, quoting assumptions in another, and actual job performance in someone’s head. This creates invisible disconnects. Quotes not aligned with current routing, schedules that don’t reflect real constraints, and historical performance that never feeds forward into better decisions. Each disconnect feels manageable in isolation. Collectively, they create margin leakage that leadership can feel but can’t quite locate. What makes all of this so frustrating isn’t that shop owners don’t care. It’s that they can’t see clearly enough to act decisively. Without integrated visibility across quoting, routing, capacity, and quality, operators run on instinct. And instinct works remarkably well until scale and complexity outpace it. The shops that consistently outperform aren’t necessarily the biggest or the busiest. They operate with clarity and consistency. Fewer assumptions and more decisions based on reality. In a manufacturing landscape where lead times keep shrinking and customers expect speed and precision at the same time, margin won’t be protected by effort alone.

Why “Perfect” Production Planning is a Myth, and How Finite Capacity Planning Fixes It

January 5, 2026
Every manufacturing leader has lived this moment: The schedule looks perfect. Orders are slotted. Commitments are made. And then reality shows up. A machine goes down. A key operator calls out. Setup times balloon. One late job cascades into five. Suddenly the plan (built meticulously inside your ERP) falls apart. Not because your team failed, but because the plan was never grounded in reality to begin with.  The Hidden Lie Inside Most ERP Schedules

Connecting AI to NetSuite Using MCP

August 27, 2025
NetSuite’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) , built in partnership with Anthropic, helps users leverage AI to ask simple, natural-language questions and get back complex, structured analysis, all powered by live NetSuite data. This practical use of AI can be used to generate reports, create or update records, perform queries, analyze reports, automate workflows, or make predictions based on real-time data. Here's how you can get started and connect AI to NetSuite using MCP: 1. Login to NetSuite and navigate to Customization → SuiteCloud Development → SuiteApp Marketplace. 2. Search “MCP Tools” > Click on the icon and install the MCP Tools SuiteApp
job shop manufacturing

What is Job Shop Manufacturing? Complete 2025 Guide

June 20, 2025
Job shop manufacturing is a production method where small batches of 1-100 units of customized or unique products are made to meet specific customer requirements. Unlike mass production, each order typically requires unique setups, specialized processes, and custom routing through the facility. In this comprehensive guide, you'll learn: The complete definition of job shop manufacturing How job shops differ from other manufacturing types Industries that rely on job shop methods Technology solutions that optimize job shop operations When to consider implementing specialized ERP systems What is Job Shop Manufacturing? (Definition) Job shop manufacturing is a production strategy focused on customization over volume . Instead of producing thousands of identical items, job shops create small quantities of unique products tailored to specific customer specifications. Key defining characteristics: Small batch sizes - Typically 1-100 units per order High product variety - Hundreds or thousands of different products Custom specifications - Each order has unique requirements Project-based workflow - Work orders last days to weeks Skilled labor - Requires specialized expertise and flexibility Job Shop is a powerful, fully integrated solution built for custom manufacturers, combining quoting, configuration, production, and fabrication workflows inside NetSuite. Learn more about SuiteDynamics' NetSuite Job Shop for Manufacturing.
A man is holding a box and a woman is looking at a tablet in a warehouse.

When Non-Standard Data Skews Your DIO: Practical Solutions for Messy Inventory Records

By Grace Martin • May 27, 2025
Uncover the challenges of data quality affecting DIO accuracy, from ghost inventory to inconsistent formats. Find out how to tackle these issues effectively with a NetSuite ERP.

Why PE Firms Are Consolidating NetSuite Instances Across Portfolio Companies

May 8, 2025
In the world of private equity, creating operational value has become increasingly critical as the market evolves. With exit timelines extending and competition for deals intensifying, PE firms are looking beyond financial engineering to drive returns. One emerging strategy that's gaining traction is the consolidation of NetSuite instances across portfolio companies. The Hidden Challenge of System Fragmentation As PE portfolios grow through acquisition, a common pattern emerges: multiple portfolio companies operating on separate NetSuite instances. While each system may work effectively in isolation, the fragmentation creates significant operational inefficiencies at the portfolio level: Redundant Licensing Costs: Each separate instance requires its own licensing structure , creating unnecessary expenses that directly impact EBITDA. Manual Consolidation Effort: Finance teams spend countless hours extracting, transforming, and manually consolidating data from disparate systems. Inconsistent Processes: Basic business functions are handled differently across portfolio companies, limiting standardization efforts. Limited Portfolio-Wide Visibility: Gaining insight across the entire portfolio requires extensive manual effort, delaying strategic decision-making. Integration Challenges: Onboarding new acquisitions becomes increasingly complex when each company maintains its own environment.
Esusu logo

Case Study: Esusu's Journey to Financial Efficiency

April 30, 2025
Explore Esusu's partnership with SuiteDynamics to enhance financial processes. Schedule a consultation to see how your business can thrive with NetSuite solutions.
Image of an office worker and a laptop, illustrating the concept of case management setup.

NetSuite Case Management Set Up: How to Configure Case Statuses, Rules, Types, Priorities, and More

By Brittany Klecker • April 30, 2025
Discover how to effectively set up and configure case statuses, rules, types, priorities, and more in NetSuite's case management system. Streamline your workflow and improve customer support with this comprehensive guide.
A man is holding a stack of cardboard boxes in a warehouse.

Understanding Backorders: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How to Manage Them

By Grace Martin • April 26, 2025
Backorders disrupt revenue and frustrate customers. Learn what "backordered" means, how backorders happen, their impact on businesses, and how NetSuite ERP can minimize the issues.
More Posts