Why Swiss fund managers still use Excel — and what it costs them

According to KPMG, 76% of real estate professionals still rely on Excel as their primary tool for portfolio analytics. For a sector that manages billions in assets and reports to institutional investors and regulators, this is a striking number — and it hasn't changed much in years.

The persistence of Excel in Swiss real estate fund management isn't irrational. It's the product of a very specific set of conditions: sophisticated teams who built their own models over years, property managers who deliver data in non-standard formats, and a reporting environment where the requirements are known but the data pipeline to feed them is fragmented.

But the cost of staying with Excel is rising. Here's where it shows up.

The consolidation problem

A typical Swiss real estate fund with a CHF 500 million portfolio might have five to eight property managers (régies), each delivering quarterly data in a different format: some in Excel, some in PDF, some extracted from their own property management software. Before any analysis can begin, someone has to clean, standardise and load that data.

For most teams, this consolidation work takes three to five days per quarter. It's largely manual. It involves checking column headers, mapping account codes, reconciling totals and chasing régies for missing line items. By the time the data is ready, the quarter is already two weeks old — and the people doing this work are typically the most expensive people in the organisation.

This is the hidden cost of Excel dependency: not the spreadsheet itself, but the labour that feeds it.

The audit risk nobody talks about

When a FINMA-regulated fund manager is audited, the auditor needs to trace every number in the report back to its source. With structured portfolio software, this is straightforward: every data point has a timestamp, a source and a change log. With Excel, it is often forensic work.

Spreadsheets don't record who changed what, when, or why. A formula can be broken and the error propagated silently for weeks. Version control in a shared drive is not a substitute for a proper audit trail. Most teams know this — but the risk only becomes a problem when it becomes a problem.

FINMA's 2025 Risk Monitor explicitly flagged growing data integrity and cyber risks for Swiss institutional managers. Regulators are paying more attention to data traceability, not less. The question for teams still on Excel is whether their current setup can withstand that scrutiny — and at what cost.

The reporting cycle that never ends

Swiss fund managers are typically required to produce FPRE-compatible reporting for their investors and regulators. The FPRE (Fondation de placement immobilier) standard requires specific metrics — vacancy rates, net initial yield, geographical breakdown — all of which must be consistent across multiple report outputs.

In an Excel environment, this means maintaining multiple linked workbooks, updating each one when the underlying data changes, and manually verifying that the outputs are consistent. It's a cycle that most teams describe as taking one to two weeks per reporting period — with a non-trivial probability of an error appearing after the reports have already been sent.

The consequence isn't just wasted time. It's the board presentation that gets delayed, the investor report that has to be corrected, the fund manager who spends the day before the deadline fixing a broken VLOOKUP instead of analysing the portfolio.

When Excel made sense, and when it stops

Excel made sense when portfolios were smaller, reporting was less standardised, and the cost of dedicated software was prohibitive relative to the complexity it solved. For a team managing two or three properties, a well-built spreadsheet model is often entirely appropriate.

The threshold starts to shift somewhere around ten to fifteen assets, or the moment a fund has more than two or three property managers delivering data. At that point, the maintenance cost of the Excel model — keeping it current, error-free and auditable — starts to exceed the cost of a purpose-built alternative.

The other threshold is investor and regulatory expectation. Institutional investors increasingly expect data rooms and reporting portals, not PDF attachments. FINMA-regulated entities face growing scrutiny on data integrity. These pressures don't disappear by keeping better spreadsheets.

What changes when you move to structured software

The transition from Excel to purpose-built portfolio management software is less disruptive than most teams expect — particularly if the software is designed to sit above existing systems rather than replace them. STREETS, for example, integrates directly with major Swiss property management platforms and régies, pulling data into a validated, structured layer without requiring those platforms to change.

What changes for the fund manager team is the consolidation work. Instead of three to five days of manual data preparation, the quarterly review cycle starts from a position where data is already loaded, validated and consistent. The time savings are real: a typical STREETS onboarding reduces quarterly consolidation from several days to a half-day review cycle.

What also changes is the audit trail. Every data point is timestamped and sourced. Changes are logged. FPRE-compatible outputs are generated from the same validated dataset, so consistency is structural rather than manual.

For teams approaching an investor due diligence process or a FINMA audit, this shift is often described as the difference between being prepared and being exposed.

The practical question

The question isn't whether Excel is a good tool — it is, for many things. The question is whether it's the right tool for consolidating data from eight property managers, generating FPRE-compatible quarterly reports and maintaining an audit trail that satisfies a FINMA examiner.

For most institutional Swiss real estate fund managers, the honest answer is that it stopped being the right tool some time ago. The cost of staying with it is now measurable in audit hours, reporting errors and the slow creep of regulatory risk.

The platform alternatives available in 2026 are faster to implement than they were five years ago, cost less relative to the problem they solve, and don't require replacing the property management systems that régies have spent years building. The threshold for change has moved significantly in the last two years.