In security little items like excel sheets are important!

As mentioned in previous posts security is not always about big and well know items like: firewalls, anti-virus, and intrusion detection.

When was the last time you audited the critical spreadsheets used through out your business!

In centralized accounting system, everything is entered, tracked, and double logged to avoid fraud. Complete audit trails are kept to ensure any entered information can be traced back to its author.

when you use spreadsheets for critical financial elements of your business you are potentially incurring a big risk. As auditing this format of information is much more difficult if not impossible.

In a very recent story a woman was sentenced to fraud of $2,000,000 from her employer by omitting entries in a spreadsheet.
More details on this story "...She said in a written statement that she posted checks intended for Superior Care, which sells pharmaceutical and medical products, to the company books but omitted them from the spreadsheet she submitted to the billing department..."

Please take note that cause of the risk may not always of a malicious nature. A simple operator mistake of one extra zero missing in a budget planning sheet can also lead to severe disaster during operations stage of you business.