Finance is one of the most pressured functions in any organisation, and the research shows it. Among accountants, two in three say they have suffered stress in their working lives, and 41% say burnout has become normal in the profession, according to 2025 research by Caba, the wellbeing charity for the ICAEW community. Across Great Britain, the Health and Safety Executive estimates that 964,000 workers were affected by work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25, with 22.1 million working days lost.
Excel is not the cause of all of that. But in many finance teams, critical planning, forecasting and reporting still run on large, linked spreadsheets that only a few people fully understand. That way of working creates exactly the conditions that decades of occupational health research link to stress: high demands, low control, constant vigilance for errors, frequent interruptions and long hours at predictable peaks.
This article sets out seven signs your team is trapped in Excel, what the research says each one does to stress, anxiety and fatigue, and what you can change. It applies to every finance role that lives with spreadsheet-driven processes: CFOs and finance directors, financial controllers, FP&A analysts, management accountants, finance business partners and the wider finance team. It is not medical advice, and if stress is affecting your health, the support section at the end explains where to get help.
How work causes stress: the science in brief
Three ideas from occupational psychology explain most of what follows.
Demands and control. Robert Karasek’s job demand-control model, first published in 1979, found that strain is highest when people face heavy demands but have little control over how and when they meet them. Hard work alone is not the problem. Hard work you cannot influence is.
Burnout. The World Health Organisation classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition, in ICD-11. It describes three dimensions: feelings of exhaustion, increased mental distance from or cynicism about one’s job, and reduced professional efficacy. All three can be traced back to how work is designed.
Technostress. Research led by Professor Monideepa Tarafdar, covering more than 3,100 employees over seven years, found that technology can increase stress through five routes: overload, invasion of personal time, complexity, insecurity and uncertainty. The same studies linked technostress to lower productivity. Spreadsheet-heavy finance processes touch every one of those five routes.
Seven signs you’re trapped in Excel
1. You feel month-end coming days before it starts
What it looks like: a knot in the stomach the weekend before close, trouble sleeping in the run-up to the board pack, or a sense of dread when the budget timetable is published.
What the research says: anticipating a stressful event can trigger the body’s stress response long before the event itself. Brosschot, Gerin and Thayer’s perseverative cognition hypothesis (2006) proposes that repeated worry about future stressors keeps the stress response switched on for longer, and that this prolonged activation, rather than the event alone, is what wears people down. A close process that depends on manual consolidation, late data and fragile links is predictably hard, so the anticipation is rational. That is what makes it so persistent.
2. You never fully trust your own numbers
What it looks like: checking the same totals three times, rebuilding a calculation to be sure, or feeling uneasy every time a report goes to the board.
What the research says: this vigilance is not paranoia. Professor Raymond Panko’s review of spreadsheet research found that audits since 1997 discovered errors in at least 86% of the spreadsheets examined, and that cell error rates in laboratory studies were typically 1% to 2% or higher. In a large model, that means errors are close to certain. A 2023 Gartner survey of 497 controllership professionals found that 18% of finance and accounting staff make financial errors at least daily, and 59% make several a month, with limited capacity named as the leading cause.
Living with a high, invisible error risk forces people into sustained vigilance. Staying on alert for something you cannot see is mentally tiring, and it feeds the anxiety that keeps people checking long after they should have stopped.
3. You check the file at night and at weekends
What it looks like: opening the forecast on your phone in the evening, replying to “quick question on the numbers” messages on Sunday, or lying awake thinking about a formula.
What the research says: Tarafdar’s research identifies “techno-invasion”, technology spilling into personal time, as one of the five main sources of technostress. Recovery research consistently finds that psychologically detaching from work outside working hours is one of the strongest protections against exhaustion. When a single spreadsheet holds the only version of the truth, and only you can answer questions about it, detaching becomes almost impossible.
4. Long days at the peaks have become normal
What it looks like: 12-hour days during close and budget season that everyone expects but nobody plans for, and a quiet pride in getting through them.
What the research says: fatigue directly affects the quality of thinking that finance work depends on. In a study for the Australian government, Williamson, Feyer and colleagues (2000) found that after 17 to 19 hours without sleep, performance on several tests fell to the level seen at a blood alcohol concentration of 0.05%. Few finance professionals stay awake that long, but a 7am start and a midnight finish during close is not unusual, and it sits within that range.
This creates a loop. Manual processes require long hours, long hours increase errors, and errors require more checking. Caba’s finding that 41% of accountants see burnout as normal suggests many finance teams, whatever their roles, no longer notice they are in it.
5. Your day is a stream of “can you just check this number?”
What it looks like: budget holders asking for figures that only finance can pull, version questions (“is this the latest?”), and deep work broken into ten-minute pieces.
What the research says: in a controlled experiment, Mark, Gudith and Klocke (2008) found that people who were regularly interrupted completed their work faster, but reported significantly higher stress, frustration, time pressure and effort than those who were not interrupted. Interruptions do not just slow work down. People compensate by working faster under more pressure, and pay for it in stress. When the numbers live in files rather than a shared system, finance becomes the help desk for every question.
6. One person holds the model together
What it looks like: one colleague built the model, only they fully understand it, and the whole team feels uneasy when they are on holiday.
What the research says: this pattern creates stress at both ends. For the model owner, it combines heavy demands with low control over when those demands arrive, the combination Karasek’s model identifies as most straining. They cannot fully switch off, take a real break or hand over work. For everyone else, it creates the uncertainty and insecurity that Tarafdar’s research links to technostress: the sense that something important could break and nobody would know how to fix it.
7. You defend it anyway
What it looks like: “it’s fine once you know its quirks”, “every system has problems”, or a reflex to justify the process before anyone has criticised it.
What the research says: people consistently prefer the current state of affairs, even when better options exist. Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988) called this status quo bias, and it is reinforced by loss aversion, the finding from Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory (1979) that losses feel roughly twice as painful as equivalent gains. Leaving a familiar spreadsheet feels like a loss, while the benefits of change feel abstract. Defending the process also protects us from an uncomfortable thought: that the stress of the last few years was not inevitable.
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Why the fix is the process, not the people
Resilience training and wellbeing apps can help individuals cope, but they leave the causes in place. The research points to changing the work itself: reducing unnecessary demands, increasing control and removing the conditions that create constant vigilance.
- Reduce demands: automate data loads and consolidation so close is spent analysing numbers, not assembling them.
- Increase control: give budget holders direct access to their own numbers, so finance is not the bottleneck for every question.
- Lower error risk: use one governed model with validation, version control and an audit trail, so people can trust the numbers without re-checking them.
- Remove single points of failure: document the logic in a shared system so no one person has to hold it in their head.
Technology alone is not enough. The same Gartner research found that organisations where staff fully accept their technology see 75% fewer financial errors, and that 73% of finance staff surveyed said the tools available to them were lacking in at least one area that drives acceptance. Change works when the people who carry the stress today help design the new process.
Five things to do this month
- Measure the peaks. Track hours worked during the next close or budget cycle, including evenings and weekends.
- Count the interruptions. Log ad hoc data requests for two weeks. Most teams are surprised by the number.
- Find the single points of failure. List every model only one person can maintain.
- Protect recovery time. Agree response-time expectations for evenings and weekends, and make sure leaders follow them first.
- Talk about it. Ask your team which part of the process causes the most stress. The answer is usually specific, and fixable.
If stress is affecting your health
Work stress is common, and it is not a personal failing. If it is affecting your sleep, mood or physical health, or lasting for weeks, talk to your GP. Members of the ICAEW community, including students and retired members, can get free, confidential support from Caba. If you belong to another professional body, such as ACCA or CIMA, check what member support it offers. Mind also offers information and support on stress and anxiety. Many employers provide an employee assistance programme, which your HR team can tell you about.
Need five minutes off?
Dodge the #REF! errors, catch the reconciled ticks and see if you can survive year-end in our game, Escape Excel.
Frequently asked questions
How common is stress in finance roles?
Very common. Caba’s 2025 research among accountants found that 67% have suffered stress in their working lives and 41% say burnout has become normalised. Gartner found that 18% of finance and accounting staff make errors at least daily, with limited capacity the leading cause.
Can spreadsheets really cause stress?
Spreadsheets themselves are neutral. The stress comes from processes that depend on them: high error risk, manual rework, long hours at peaks, constant interruptions and reliance on one person. Research on job demands, interruptions and technostress links each of these to higher stress.
Is burnout a medical diagnosis?
No. The World Health Organization classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon in ICD-11, not a medical condition. It describes exhaustion, mental distance or cynicism about work, and reduced professional efficacy. If you are struggling, talk to your GP.
What is the first step to reducing spreadsheet stress in a finance team?
Measure it. Track hours during close and budget season, log ad hoc requests and list the models that depend on one person. That gives you the evidence to make the case for change, and our guide on how to build a business case for FP&A software shows how to present it.
References
- Brosschot, J. F., Gerin, W. and Thayer, J. F. (2006). The perseverative cognition hypothesis: a review of worry, prolonged stress-related physiological activation, and health. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 60(2), 113–124.
- Caba (2025). Behind the Profession research, reported in Accountancy Today, 19 November 2025.
- Gartner (2024). Survey of 497 controllership professionals, conducted July 2023, reported in CPA Practice Advisor, 4 March 2024.
- Health and Safety Executive (2025). Work-related ill health statistics 2024/25, reported by British Safety Council.
- Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: an analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291.
- Karasek, R. A. (1979). Job demands, job decision latitude, and mental strain: implications for job redesign. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24(2), 285–308.
- Mark, G., Gudith, D. and Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress. Proceedings of CHI 2008, 107–110.
- Panko, R. R. (2000). Spreadsheet errors: what we know, what we think we can do. Proceedings of the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group.
- Samuelson, W. and Zeckhauser, R. (1988). Status quo bias in decision making. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1(1), 7–59.
- Tarafdar, M., D’Arcy, J., Turel, O. and Gupta, A. (2015). The dark side of information technology. MIT Sloan Management Review, 56(2). Summary from Lancaster University.
- Williamson, A., Feyer, A-M., Friswell, R. and Finlay-Brown, S. (2000). Development of measures of fatigue: using an alcohol comparison to validate the effects of fatigue on performance. Australian Transport Safety Bureau, CR 189.
- World Health Organization (2019). Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon”: International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11, QD85).
About Kybos
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