Cider and spreadsheets

Cider drinks and spreadsheets – what’s the link?

Cider is an alcoholic drink made out of apples and has become more popular in recent years in the UK. One of the most popular brands of cider in the UK is Magners cider, the brand owned by the C&C Group.

We all know that there are lots of benefits of using spreadsheets such as Excel (e.g. speed of use, quantity of data that can be analyzed, etc) but we should all be aware that mistakes do happen with spreadsheet.

Earlier this summer shares in the C&C Group fell approximately 15% after the group said that revenue in the 4 months to the end of June had fallen by 5% rather than the 3% increase that had been reported a week earlier!

The group’s Finance Director said that the error in the earlier announcement occurred after data was incorrectly transferred from an accounting system to a spreadsheet used to produce the trading statement. Quite an embarrassing mistake and a valuable lesson in that even if spreadsheets are extremely powerful tools in business if the wrong data is inputted you will receive misleading results.

Also, it should be stated that consuming excessive amounts of cider when using excel could result in unpredictable results…