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.

A financial model is a tool to put theories/predictions to test, a financial simulation to measure suitability of a transaction or a reporting tool to get insights into business performance.