Should We Just Build It in Excel and VBA?
Most companies asking this question are right. Excel really is a good tool for invoice analysis and the correct starting point. Below we've written where it works, where it breaks, and how to recognize the moment it breaks.
First, give it its due: Excel does this job
Exporting your invoices to Excel and totalling by supplier with a pivot table, placing unit prices side by side to see the change, separating and summing VAT rates — all of it is possible in Excel. With Power Query you can read a folder of files in bulk; with VBA you can automate pulling text out of a PDF.
Many companies take this path and run it without trouble for years. Having tried it before buying software also means moving in the right order. You can't know whether a tool is genuinely necessary until you've done the work by hand once.
So the question isn't "is Excel inadequate." The question is: how many times does this work repeat for you, and what happens as it repeats?
The breaking point isn't volume, it's repetition
Where Excel struggles is usually not the number of invoices. You can process 400 invoices in Excel. The strain appears when you start redoing the same work every month.
The monthly cycle runs like this: you download the files, put them in a folder, run the macro, merge supplier names in the resulting table, open last month's file and compare, refresh the pivot. Each step is small on its own. The total is a day.
The real cost of that day isn't the time spent, it's who spends it. This job is usually done by the most capable person on the finance team, because they're the one who built the table. In other words, the only person in the company who could do analysis spends a day of the month preparing data for analysis.
Three quiet problems
The problems with Excel-built solutions don't make noise. The three most common:
1. When the template changes, the macro silently produces incomplete data
Your supplier updates their invoice design, a column shifts, the macro can't find that field and skips it. No error message appears; the table keeps working, only some rows come through incomplete. The only way to notice is to check the total by hand. Most teams do that check in the first few months, then stop.
2. Supplier names don't merge
"ABC İnşaat Ltd. Şti.", "ABC INSAAT LTD STI" and "Abc İnşaat" are the same company but three separate rows in a pivot table. You merge them by hand. Next month a new spelling variant arrives and you merge again. This work never ends, because its source is the supplier's own record-keeping discipline.
3. When the person who built the table leaves, the file closes
A solution built in VBA lives in the head of whoever wrote it. When that person leaves, the file keeps running but nobody can change it. When a supplier changes a template, no fix can be found; the team goes back to entering data by hand.
What EFaturaFlow does
The same work: it reads incoming e-invoices and turns them into a clean table. The difference sits in three places:
Maintenance isn't yours. If a supplier template changes, we fix the parsing. There is nothing to do on your side.
The output stays Excel. The product doesn't pull you out of Excel. With the file you download, you keep building pivots and writing formulas. What's taken off your hands is the work of building the table.
A dashboard comes alongside it. Supplier shares, unit price movement, VAT and tax withholding distribution, cost center breakdown arrive ready. You could build these in Excel, but you'd have to rebuild them every month.
| Topic | Excel / VBA | EFaturaFlow |
|---|---|---|
| Initial setup | Your own team, a few days to a few weeks | No setup — upload files and start |
| Monthly repetition | Manual run and corrections every month | Automatic after upload |
| When a supplier template changes | Someone has to update the macro | Fixed on our side |
| Are incomplete transfers noticed | Usually only by manual checking | Parsing checks are inside the product |
| Supplier name variants | Manual merging | Automatic grouping |
| Dependency on one person | High — whoever built the file | None |
| Excel output | Yes | Yes |
| Dashboard | You build it yourself | Arrives ready |
| Cost | No license, but labor | Starts at 7.500 TL/month + VAT |
Cases where staying in Excel is the better call
It may look odd for us to write this, but the truth is: not every company needs this product. If you're in the situations below, stay in Excel.
- If you receive 20–30 invoices a month. At that volume, handling it manually takes half an hour and buying a tool doesn't pay off.
- If you run the analysis once or twice a year. If you look at it once during budget season, Excel is enough for that once.
- If you don't need a line-level breakdown. If the total amount and supplier name suffice, your accounting software's report will do the job.
- If your invoices come from a single supplier with the same template. If the template is fixed, the macro stays fixed and no maintenance burden appears.
How many hours went into turning last month's invoice data into a table? Who did that work? If that person went on leave, would the same table still appear? If the answer to all three is uncomfortable, you've reached the breaking point.
How the transition works
You don't have to abandon your current Excel setup. Most companies run one month in parallel: they process the same invoices with both their own macro and the product, then compare the two tables. Differences become visible, confidence builds, and then they move to one path.
The 15-day trial exists exactly for this. We don't ask for a credit card, and it stops automatically when the period ends.
Compare with your own invoices
Upload last month's invoices and put the resulting table side by side with your own Excel file. That's the most accurate comparison there is.
Try 15 Days Free →Other comparisons
- Uploading invoices to an AI tool vs. EFaturaFlow
- Your accounting software's "export to Excel" button vs. EFaturaFlow