How to Add Excel-Like Spreadsheets to Your JavaScript Fintech Application

August 26 2021

Calling all FinTech developers! Spreadsheets are a key component of the financial industry. They play a critical role in accounting and financial firms and enable them to manage data, complex financial workflows, and evaluate trends.

Data is typically collected, stored, and modified on an individual spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is then shared via email or transferred into a financial by manual data entry or through an API.

Depending on the type of spreadsheets, some drawbacks affect workflow efficiency, create opportunities for security risks, and make document version control frustrating and difficult. Microsoft Excel is the preferred spreadsheet solution for most financial industry professionals, so it's needless to say that cutting out the need for individual workbooks and harboring the power of Excel in your fintech application is a game-changer.

Introducing the complete financial toolbox, SpreadJS – our true Excel-like JavaScript Spreadsheet API.

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Introducing SpreadJS

SpreadJS is the World’s #1 selling JavaScript spreadsheet API solution. It's an industry leader, with 25 years of experience in creating spreadsheets for professional developers. With no dependencies on Excel, SpreadJS supports importing and exporting Excel files, PDFs, and much more.

It also includes a high-speed calculation engine that supports over 500 Excel functions, a no-code JavaScript Spreadsheet Template Designer, and gives users complete document control. SpreadJS is a must-have for your web-based financial application.

*Note that we also have a .NET spreadsheet component called Spread .NET to provide our .NET developers with similar features.

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Workflow Efficiency Benefits

As remote work increases in commonality, companies are moving to Cloud-based or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Web-Based applications to accommodate the needs of their consumers (Vivian, 2021). This opens an opportunity to improve internal processes and communication with customers.

For example, if a company needs information from a customer, excel files are currently shared with a customer to add data. The customer would then send it back to an employee to manually enter the shared information.

Using SpreadJS within an application can provide an Excel-like UI that the customer can directly input their information into. This gives more power to developers to create processes or even automate tasks on the back end to handle the inputted data saving time, streamlining communication with customers, and minimizing the chance of any manual data entry errors. This is just one example of a workflow that is dependent on an Excel workbook that SpreadJS can improve!

Security Benefits

As previously mentioned, many financial companies have moved to remote work in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This means FinTech developers need to take into consideration common security risks from remote/home offices all while still providing a high-speed and convenient consumer experience.

According to Verizon 2020 Data Breach Investigation Report (Verizon Business, 2020), an estimated 90% of malware that is delivered through email is hidden in common Microsoft file types, such as Excel files (.xlsx). Implementing SpreadJS can cut out the need to send and receive Excel files from external emails–minimizing the risk for malicious malware finding its way into your companies’ network.

Document Version Control Benefits

Members of the Financial industry are no strangers to sharing independent Excel workbooks to track data that is used to then generate reports. However, there is no guarantee that the data within the file is up to date since there could be another saved workbook on a different user’s machine.

This leads to inaccurate data analysis. While there are cloud-based solutions, like Google Docs, where multiple users can make changes to a workbook, there are some drawbacks.

For example, if too many changes are happening at once, this can cause complex sheet formulas to recalculate, making the sheet slow and users can experience errors that could break or corrupt the workbook. Implementing SpreadJS in your FinTech application can handle this age-long version control issue!

SpreadJS can interact with your companies’ database to give the user access to the most up-to-date data for more accurate reports that all users have access too. SpreadJS is removing the need to track the data in an individual workbook, and bringing it all to one location–making the issue of document version control a thing of the past.

Goodbye Old Spreadsheets...Hello, the Next Generation!

We've discussed many of the drawbacks that users can experience–depending on individual spreadsheets–and how SpreadJS avoids them. It is important that during these changing times we not only push through but improve our processes and our users' experience.

Leveraging the power of our JavaScript Excel spreadsheet SpreadJS will not only help grow your FinTech application but can improve the day-to-day workflows of your consumers.

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