Hub85 and spreadsheet governance

Hub85 is a young company based in London, that is offering spreadsheet governance. The most impressive thing about it is the way that it uses graphics. Take a look at the screenshot below.

This is actually using Tableau, but you could use Qlik or PowerBI or some other visualisation tool. The point here is that Hub85 is providing the underlying logic and then you visualise that appropriately. I have to say that I haven’t seen any other product in this space that looks this good.

Now let’s consider that underlying logic. Look at what this screenshot shows us: that Hub85 knows how many spreadsheets you have, how many people use those spreadsheets, where they are located by department and region, which ones have errors, which ones require passwords (perhaps these spreadsheets contain sensitive data), which ones require a review of the underlying model, and so on. As you can imagine, you can click on any of these graphics to get to finer levels of detail down to individual detail.

Graphics don’t just apply at the sort of level described, but also, for example, to functions. Again, this is easier to illustrate – see below – rather than write a thousand words about.

Without going into all the details, Hub85 does all the sort of things that you would expect it to do. However, I must point out one significant difference from most other suppliers in this market. This is that there is no requirement to centralise the spreadsheets under management: they are tracked and managed at source in a similar way to the way that Apparity works, using fingerprinting so that usage of specific spreadsheets can be tracked.

As I mentioned at the outset, Hub85 is pretty much a start-up although it already has a few customers in production, with rather more currently undertaking proofs of concept. It got an award from London Business School and is running live tests on a future production release within the FCA Regulatory Sandbox. It is currently offering a free “health checks & analysis report” on a batch of spreadsheets for prospective clients. I think it is well worth taking a look.