Spiff vs. Spreadsheets

Excel changed how businesses operate in three key ways. It created a functional programming language that every financial professional could use. It merged that language with a lightweight database. And, it provided a real-time data visualization component.

Since then, however, there have been no real improvements or advancements to the original functionality of Excel. Spiff has the same core functionality you know and love from Excel but with 40+ years of technological advancements layered on top to improve the experience.

Spiff Easily Integrates with modern, object-oriented software that most businesses rely on- Salesforce, Workday, and Netsuite are just a few examples. Excel does not. Spiff maintains all of the functionality of Excel but adds native integration with modern connected systems. You could think of it like making Excel object-oriented which facilitates automation and scalability.

In Spiff, you won’t see complicated formulas using ordinal references like if(A3, B16 / D2 * C4, D18). Instead, you’ll read your formulas in natural language like ARR = MRR * 12. It’s basically the same thing as naming every calculation in Excel with a Named Range.

In Spiff, you can also specify groups of Opportunities using a no-code visual filter builder (just like a Salesforce report builder). We call these Datasets. You can think of these as very similar to Sheets in Excel but they are tables of objects.

Spiff functions typically support two versions. The first is the same as Excel. For example, you can write `sum(1, 2, 3)` to get 6. But you can also sum over a dataset of connected objects from a source system like Salesforce and specify which attribute you want to sum.