MILLIONS of pounds can vanish into a financial black hole through the errors people make when filling in computer spreadsheets used by companies to keep track of their cash.
Raymond Panko, a professor in the decision sciences department at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, has discovered an alarming pattern in studies of spreadsheet errors over the past 10 years. "Every last one of the studies has found a dangerously high rate of errors," he says.
The problem, says Panko, is that spreadsheets demand a level of accuracy that humans find difficult to maintain, especially when entering numbers into spreadsheet "cells". He estimates that humans make around one error per hundred cells. "Human beings do not err often," he says, "but in large spreadsheets with many [hundreds of] cells, the normal human error rate is fatal."
Panko's review of a decade's worth of studies has revealed that on average 30 per ...
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