Budget

Budgeting system (includes General Ledger reporting system plus budgeting ability)

Spreadsheet links:  All business analysts are guilty of using spreadsheet links.  Let me count the ways that spreadsheet links are bad. 

-a cell in Excel can only have a certain number of characters in it.  When people try to use links to consolidate multple workbooks it doesn't take long before they run out of characters to enter in the formula.  In one case, the mapping to the network drive changed (5 more positions were added to the name) which resulted in breaking every report that was being used for corporate consolidations. 

-people have been known to link to a file on someone's desktop.  When they happen to not be in the office, you can't get the data.

-people have made sheets that link to sheets that link to sheets.  In the beginning this seems to make sense.  6 months later, you find that people are spending their time trying to decipher the links.  When a value doesn't consolidate properly, the number of places to look gets exponentially large.

-by implementing spreadsheet links, you are designing an inflexible system.  What if the number of rows changes for some of your entities.  Are you going to be diciplined to implement the change to every spreadsheet or only the affected sheets?  If the latter, now you no longer have a standard layout and cannot copy formulas with dynamic references on your consolidation sheets.