Why do financial models become more complex? Have you come across the situation where after doing the complex calculations you realize that it is of no use? Should you include everything all kinds calculations, balance, permutation / combinations without knowing the end goal of the model?

Building a first financial model from scratch can take weeks, often at the cost of sleep and sanity. By the time the second model comes around, even for a different business, it's common to notice large parts of the logic repeating. And the same happens in the third. That's when the thought arises: Should there be a universal template that contains all the logics used repeatedly? Would that save time in the long run?

We were tasked with building a data-intensive monthly financial model spanning 6 years, handling over 100,000 rows of sales data. The use of long-range formulas across such a dataset made the workbook painfully slow to calculate. We decided to challenge some of the conventional financial modelling best practices, just to see if they could be bent (carefully!) in favor of performance.