The financial model is the asset. Stop sending it away.
Rate cards, pricing models, feasibility analyses and planning tools represent years of accumulated judgement. The moment one leaves as an attachment, you have handed over the method along with the answer. Publish it as an application and people get the answer while the model stays yours.
What you give away with the file
Finance teams tend to distribute models because there has been no other way to let someone use one.
The method, not just the number
A recipient who opens the workbook can read the assumptions, the rate tables, the margin logic and the adjustments. In competitive pricing that is the part with the value in it.
Answers you cannot reproduce
Once copies are in circulation, two people quote different numbers and both believe they used the current model. Reconciling which version produced which answer is its own piece of work.
A change that never fully lands
Rates move. The file you re-sent is now the third version in someone's downloads folder, and there is no way to know which one is being used tomorrow.
Manual loops around the model
The workaround is often a form, an inbox and a person: collect the inputs, run them through the workbook, send the results back. It works, and it does not scale past a certain volume.
Four ways finance teams publish a model
The same workbook, reached in whichever way suits the audience.
A pricing, savings or planning tool a client can run themselves, without seeing the model.
See how it worksMonthly reporting published once instead of prepared and emailed per recipient.
See how it worksRate cards, margin rules and discount structures turned into something sales can use.
See how it worksThe same calculation called by another system rather than opened by a person.
See how it worksWhat stays under your control
The model keeps working the way it was built and audited. What changes is who can see it.
The formulas never reach the browser
Calculation happens server-side, so users submit inputs and receive results without the workbook being downloaded. All 501 supported Excel functions run unchanged, including the lookups and nested logic these models depend on.
One version, changed on purpose
There is a single current model. Update the workbook, upload it, and every user is on the new figures at once, with the previous version still on record rather than scattered across desktops.
Every run is a record
Inputs and results are stored per submission, so you can aggregate what people are actually asking of the model, and revisit an individual answer months later.
Two models that went out to users
An adviser replacing a manual loop, and a lender putting rate pricing in front of its dealer network.
I spent a few hours and was able to get the application pretty close. Then I had some help from the SpreadsheetWeb team to fix it up, and it all took a couple of days. I was ready to go live within a week. I would have guessed that custom coding would have taken weeks or months, and several to tens of thousands of dollars. Previously I had a form on my website and people would send me the data. My admin person would input the data into the calculator and send back the results.
It allows us to price our products more accurately. To create our online rate solution for dealers, we simply built a model in Excel and loaded it into SpreadsheetWeb. Any challenges along the way were fixed in hours, not days. Not only are we able to update rates and other terms for our various loan products, but dealers are also able to calculate actual loan costs based on vehicle and customer information in seconds. There is no guesswork, no last minute changes, and no post-purchase denials.
Elsewhere: Coffee Break Financials avoided an $80,000 to $100,000 custom build for feasibility analysis, Premium Analysis published an advanced retirement planning model, and Broker Village deploys changes to complex investment models in near real time.
Pick the model you are tired of emailing
Start free and publish it, or tell us who needs to run it and what they should not be able to see, and we will tell you what it would take.