Built by someone who’s spent a decade inside the models finance teams rely on
Bhav Borkhatria
Founder, Excelerate
I’m Bhav, founder of Excelerate and a finance professional with more than a decade of experience across corporate finance, advisory and in-house FP&A.
I’ve spent much of my career supporting private-equity-backed businesses through periods of rapid growth and transactional change, most recently in SaaS. Over the past five years, I’ve built FP&A teams from the ground up, led reporting, run budgeting and forecasting cycles, contributed to two acquisitions and supported a successful exit to private equity.
Along the way, I’ve built, reviewed and relied on a lot of Excel models, and I kept running into the same problem. Good modelling practices lived in people’s heads, in old templates and in shortcuts passed between colleagues. As teams grew, so did the variation in how models were built, reviewed and handed over.
I don’t think the answer is to replace Excel. Finance teams use it for good reason: it’s flexible, familiar and exceptionally powerful. The opportunity is to put better tools and standards around the work they already do in it.
That idea became Excelerate.
Excel’s greatest strength is also its weakness
Excel remains the number one tool for analysis, forecasting and financial modelling because it lets finance professionals build almost anything. But that flexibility comes with a cost.
Every modeller develops their own conventions for formatting inputs, structuring formulas, presenting assumptions, organising worksheets and reviewing a finished model. In a small team, those differences can be manageable. As the team grows, they become harder to control.
Before long, it’s hard to tell at a glance where the inputs are, which formulas must never be amended, what depends on another worksheet or an external workbook, and what conventions a new joiner should follow.
Eventually, knowledge of the model sits with the person who built it rather than within the model itself. That creates risk when the same workbook is supporting a management decision, forecast, investment case or transaction.
Standards need to live inside the way people work
A modelling standard only scales when it is defined, taught and consistently applied.
Large advisory firms and corporations have understood this for years. They establish modelling conventions, define their own syntax and structures, and teach those standards to new joiners. Open one of their models and, before reading a single number, you can often tell who built it.
Most finance teams don’t have that. A growing FP&A team hires analysts from different backgrounds, each bringing their own habits. Each of them ends up working to a private standard — and that standard often leaves when they do.
AI didn’t create this problem. It amplified it.
AI is changing how quickly financial models can be created. A model that once took days to build can increasingly be produced in hours. That is an extraordinary opportunity for finance teams.
But faster model creation doesn’t remove the need for review. Someone still has to understand the logic, challenge the assumptions, spot inconsistencies and ultimately stand behind the numbers.
The time it takes to create a model is falling rapidly, but the responsibility for reviewing it is not. As models become more numerous and more complex, review needs to become more systematic: clear standards, checks that give the same answer every time, and a repeatable way to understand what is happening inside a workbook.
Where Excelerate fits
Excelerate brings productivity, standards and review directly into Excel, with three aims.
Build more efficiently
The add-in provides 70+ tools for the everyday work of building, formatting, analysing, auditing and preparing financial models, alongside a growing library of finance-focused functions.
Work to a consistent standard
The Excelerate portal gives teams one central place for the styles, templates and functions they build with, so modelling conventions become a shared standard rather than something individuals are expected to remember.
Review with confidence
When it’s time to review a workbook, Excelerate runs systematic checks for issues such as hard-coded values, inconsistent formulas, circular references and broken external links. Checks that often depend on individual experience and hours of manual review become a repeatable process.
Beyond the tools, Excelerate is built to help finance professionals become better modellers, with templates, functions and training that show not just what a better model looks like, but why it’s better.
The aim isn’t to replace the judgement of the modeller or reviewer. It’s to back that judgement up.
What Excelerate believes
Deterministic over probabilistic
An audit finding should be reproducible. Every Excelerate check is designed to return the same result for the same workbook, and to point you towards something you can inspect yourself. Nothing is sampled, and nothing is reduced to a score you can’t trace back to the workbook. If a finding matters, you should be able to see it, understand it and explain it.
Your workbook stays yours
Financial models can contain some of a company’s most commercially sensitive information, and Excelerate is designed with that in mind. The add-in runs inside Excel, and using its tools does not require sending your formulas, values or cell contents anywhere else. Where you choose to upload something to the Excelerate portal, it’s made clear what is being shared.
Standards beat heroics
Great finance teams shouldn’t depend on one person remembering how everything works. Good modelling practices should be teachable, repeatable and built into the way the team works. A brilliant modeller can fix a workbook. A good standard helps prevent the workbook from needing to be fixed in the first place.
Show the work
You shouldn’t have to take a software company’s claims on trust. Excelerate’s tools can be explored, its audit checks are named for exactly what they look for, and every result points back to the workbook itself. You should be able to understand what a tool is doing — and check the result for yourself.
Built with the people who use it
Excelerate is still evolving, and I want the people using it to have a real say in where it goes next. Feedback directly shapes the roadmap, from new productivity tools and audit checks to templates, functions and training. If there’s something you’d like to see, please get in touch.
The Excelerate add-in is paused until Q1 2027 while we make significant improvements. Join the waitlist to be the first to hear when it returns.
Try it against your own model
The fastest way to judge any of this is to run the audit over a workbook you already know is messy, and see whether it finds what you know is in there.