This year marks a major milestone: Excel turns 40.
For four decades, business planning has been built on spreadsheets. It’s hard to overstate their influence: flexible, familiar, and powerful for their time, spreadsheets became the foundation of modern business planning. But the world has changed. Teams move faster. Data flows in real time. Decisions can’t wait for version 12 of a file to be emailed around.
After more than forty years in this space, we at Kaleidoscope understand the problem well enough to have designed — and built — a platform that can truly replace Excel for business planning. We’ve lived that pain firsthand. Every what-if model, version conflict, and broken formula has reminded us that planning deserves better.
Planning has outgrown spreadsheets
Spreadsheets were revolutionary in the 1980s. But now in 2025, they’re struggling to keep up with how businesses actually work. Teams are distributed, data comes from everywhere, the pace of change has never been higher. Yet too many plans still live in fragile files, built on formulas no one wants to touch — tools designed for a world that no longer exists. Not to mention the growing risks around security and governance.
It’s time for something new.
Building the next generation of business planning
Over the past few years, we’ve been quietly building the Kaleidoscope Modelling Platform — a smarter, faster, more collaborative foundation for business planning. It delivers the structure, version control, and collaboration that spreadsheets never had because they were never designed for it.
Kaleidoscope gives you the flexibility you love in spreadsheets, but connects your data seamlessly into a natural living model of your business, that evolves as quickly as your business does.
It’s where planning becomes continuous, not static.
Model, adapt, and explore “what-if” scenarios together.
See the downstream impact of every change instantly.
Trust that every number, across every plan, stays consistent and connected.
Your data lives in Lists, Blocks, and Relationships, so you can build plans from shared, reliable data, not isolated sheets. Every calculation stays live and traceable, helping your team move faster.
From validation to vision
We started by developing the core calculation engine, the technology that makes everything else possible.
Over the last two years, we’ve built and validated two full applications — one for sales planning and another for stock planning — to prove what the platform could do. Each delivered the ease and focus of a point solution, but ran on an underlying system capable of modelling any part of a business.
Now, we’re ready to open it up.
At its core, the Kaleidoscope Modelling Platform creates a single source of planning truth that connects across the business. When every number is linked, and every team plans from the same foundation, decisions become faster, smarter, and better aligned. Because businesses deserve the same flexibility Excel gave them but with automation, accuracy, and visibility built in.
Not another point tool. Not another spreadsheet. A new foundation for the next 40 years of planning.
The future of planning starts here
If you’ve ever hit Ctrl + C one too many times in your forecast, or built a formula longer than your arm, you’ll want to see what’s coming next.
We’re reimagining planning for a world that’s faster, more connected, and more ambitious than ever.
Thanks Excel, it's been a great 40 years. It's time for something new.