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Gridavera is a SaaS Excel plugin that connects Microsoft Excel to SharePoint for financial planning and data management. It allows finance teams to load, edit, and submit data using the Excel interface they already know — while benefiting from enterprise-grade security, role-based access control, and centralized data governance.

Gridavera is designed for finance, planning, and operations teams that use Excel for budgeting, forecasting, or data entry but need a secure, collaborative way to manage data. It’s ideal for organizations that already use Microsoft 365 and SharePoint.

Gridavera installs as an Excel add-in. Once installed, a taskpane appears in Excel where users can select a view, load data from SharePoint, edit it in Excel, and submit changes back — all without leaving Excel. An admin portal handles configuration, user management, and security settings.

Yes. Gridavera uses SharePoint lists as its data backend. You need a Microsoft 365 subscription with SharePoint Online. Gridavera does not require any additional infrastructure — everything runs on your existing Microsoft 365 environment.

Gridavera works with Excel for Windows (desktop), Excel for Mac, and Excel on the web (Office 365). It uses the Office Add-in framework, which is supported across all modern Excel platforms.

The easiest path is to install Gridavera for Excel from Microsoft AppSource — search for “Gridavera” in the Office Add-ins store inside Excel (Insert → Get Add-ins) or visit appsource.microsoft.com and click “Get it now”. The Gridavera button then appears on the Home tab of the Excel ribbon.

For organisation-wide deployment, your Microsoft 365 admin can push the add-in to all users via the M365 Admin Center (Settings → Integrated apps → Get apps), so end users don’t need to install it themselves.

A typical setup takes 30–60 minutes using the Deployment Wizard. The wizard walks you through defining your data lists, views, roles, and security settings step by step. More complex setups with multiple transaction lists and fine-grained security may take longer.

Yes. The Deployment Wizard supports importing list definitions from an Excel file. You can also start from existing SharePoint lists or create new ones from scratch.

For the initial installation, you’ll need a Microsoft 365 admin to deploy the add-in and grant the necessary Azure AD app permissions. After that, Gridavera administrators can manage everything through the admin portal without IT involvement.

Gridavera offers three tiers:

• Starter: For small teams getting started with financial planning in Excel
• Professional: For growing organizations with more sites and backup needs
• Enterprise: For large organizations requiring unlimited sites, backups, and premium support

Gridavera doesn’t lock you out instantly. When a trial ends or a paid subscription cancels, the tenant enters a 7-day read-only grace state:

• Loads and dimension reads still work — users can open their views and see their data
• Submit attempts show a “Subscribe to resume editing” CTA instead of writing back
• A countdown banner shows the days of grace remaining
• We send cadence-aware reminder emails (monthly subscribers get tighter cadence, quarterly/annual get gentler cadence)

After the 7-day grace expires, the plugin moves to a fully blocked state. Your data in SharePoint is never touched by Gridavera — it stays exactly as you left it. Renewing or starting a new subscription restores full access immediately.

Yes — a 14-day free trial is auto-provisioned the first time someone in your tenant signs in to the plugin via Office SSO. No credit card is required up-front, and you get full feature access for the duration of the trial. The plugin and admin panel show a countdown banner as you approach the end of the trial (visible all the way through the final day).

Several paths, all self-service:

• Inside the plugin: during the trial-end window or read-only grace, click “Subscribe” — you’re taken to a Stripe-hosted checkout to pick a plan and pay
• Admin panel → Subscription: shows live plan cards driven by the current pricing table, with monthly / quarterly / annual cadence options and discount badges
• In-app plan changes: upgrade or downgrade from the admin Subscription page; a preview modal shows the Stripe-calculated proration credit or charge before you confirm
• Stripe Customer Portal: the “Manage Billing” button opens Stripe’s hosted portal for invoices, payment-method updates, and cancellation
• Pricing page: visit gridavera.com/pricing for an at-a-glance comparison
• Sales: for enterprise pricing or custom arrangements, contact sales@gridavera.com

Each tier has limits on the number of users, transaction lists, dimension lists, views per list, roles, sites, and backup versions you can have. Today the behaviour is:

• Adding a new resource at the limit is blocked in the admin panel — the “Add” button is disabled with an explanatory tooltip
• Existing resources continue to work even if a downgrade leaves you over-provisioned — we don’t silently disable lists or deactivate users you’ve already created
• The admin panel surfaces “X of Y” counters wherever a limit applies, so you can see how close you are
• If you genuinely need more headroom, you can either upgrade your tier from the Subscription page or contact support to discuss a per-tenant override for your specific case

A more proactive over-provisioning experience (banners showing how to reduce usage, a “guided downgrade” wizard) is on the post-launch roadmap.

Stripe will automatically retry the charge over the next several days using its standard dunning settings. Gridavera also sends cadence-aware reminder emails:

• Monthly subscribers: 3 reminders over roughly 7 days (tighter cadence to recover quickly)
• Quarterly / annual subscribers: 3 reminders over roughly 14 days (gentler cadence)

Each email links directly to the Stripe Customer Portal where you can update your payment method or pay an invoice. If the retry window closes without payment, your subscription cancels and the tenant moves into the standard 7-day read-only grace described above. Throughout the retry and grace window your data in SharePoint is never touched.

Gridavera uses optimized CAML queries to fetch data from SharePoint and writes data in batches of 20 records to avoid throttling. Change detection ensures only modified rows are submitted, minimizing network traffic.

Yes. Each user loads their own copy of the data into Excel. When they submit, Gridavera writes their changes to SharePoint. Since changes are submitted row by row, multiple users can work on different rows simultaneously. However, if two users modify the same row, the last submission wins.

Your work in Excel is safe — it’s a local file. However, you won’t be able to submit changes or load new data until you’re back online. Gridavera shows an offline banner and will prompt you to reconnect when you try to submit.

Yes. Users with the “Append” permission can add new rows directly from Excel. New rows are highlighted in green and validated for required fields before submission.

Row deletion is not supported for transaction lists through the Excel plugin. For dimension lists, authorized users can delete selected rows using the Dimensions tab. This design prevents accidental mass deletion of financial data.

Cascade lookups are dependent dropdowns where the options in one column are filtered based on the value in another column. For example, selecting a “Region” filters the “Country” dropdown to only show countries in that region.

Yes. The admin portal has a one-click Power BI Template (.pbit) export that produces a Power BI Desktop file pre-wired to your tenant’s SharePoint configuration:

• The data model is auto-injected — tables, columns, lineage tags, and relationships are generated from your transaction lists, dimension lists, and dimension relationships
• An M (Power Query) script is injected for each list so it pulls live from your SharePoint site
• Download the .pbit, open in Power BI Desktop, sign in with your Microsoft 365 account, and click Refresh — no manual model construction

This is intended for finance and BI teams that want to layer dashboards on top of their Gridavera planning data without rebuilding the data model from scratch.

A view is a configured perspective on a SharePoint list. It defines which columns are visible, their display names, their order, and which users can access it. A single list can have multiple views — for example, a “Budget Input” view for editors and a “Budget Review” view for managers.

Yes. You can create as many views as needed. Each view can show different columns, have different display names, and be assigned different access permissions.

Use the “Manage SP Views” tool in the admin portal’s Views configuration page. Select the transaction list, name your view, choose which columns to include, arrange their order, and save. The view is automatically registered in the configuration.

Yes. In the Columns configuration, you can set a custom display name for any column. The display name appears as the Excel column header instead of the SharePoint internal field name.

The admin portal provides full control over:

• User management (add/edit/remove users, assign roles)
• Role and permission configuration
• View and column settings
• Dimension list management
• Security filter configuration
• Encryption settings
• Backup and restore
• Tenant profile and subscription management
• SharePoint list creation and management

Yes. Gridavera supports both local export (JSON download) and cloud backup with versioning. You can restore any previous backup version with a side-by-side comparison of current vs. backup data.

This depends on your subscription tier:

• Starter: 5 versions
• Professional: 20 versions
• Enterprise: Unlimited

Yes. You can create new lists with custom fields, rename existing lists, delete lists, add or remove columns, and change column types — all without leaving the Gridavera admin portal.

Gridavera includes an admin succession flow so a tenant is never permanently locked out:

1. Any user opening the plugin who is not currently an admin sees a “Claim admin rights” button on the user-not-authorised screen
2. Clicking it sends an email to the current registered admin with one-click Approve or Deny links
3. If the current admin approves, the requesting user is added as a new tenant admin and can take over configuration
4. If the current admin is unreachable (no longer at the company), reach out to support@gridavera.com — our ops team can perform a manual succession after verifying ownership through your Microsoft 365 tenant identifiers

Approval links are signed with HMAC-SHA256 and expire after 7 days. Every claim request is logged in the activity feed for audit purposes.

Today, the vendor (Gridavera ops) Activity Feed captures every meaningful action — plugin loads and submits, dimension edits, configuration changes, role permission updates, encryption key rotations, backup/restore, Stripe billing events, claim-admin requests, and more — with tenant, site, actor, timestamp, and change details. Ops can filter by date range / tenant / category / event keyword and export to CSV.

A customer-facing audit log (so your own admins can self-serve see who changed what without contacting support) is on the roadmap. In the interim, ops can pull a CSV for your tenant on request via support@gridavera.com.

Gridavera uses multiple layers of security:

• No passwords stored: sign-in uses Microsoft 365 single sign-on (Office SSO) for the plugin and Microsoft Entra ID Bearer JWT for the admin panel — Gridavera never sees or stores user passwords
• Role-based access control: users only see views and columns they are authorised to access
• Row-level filtering: dimension filters restrict which rows each user can see, enforced server-side via SharePoint CAML queries
• Column-level encryption: sensitive columns can be encrypted with AES-256-GCM, with keys held in Azure Key Vault, never written into app config, and supplied to the add-in only as a non-exportable handle
• Sheet protection: Excel cells are locked based on user permissions
• Permission verification: a SHA-256 permission hash is re-checked at submit time so mid-session permission changes can’t be exploited
• No long-lived secrets in the bundle: as of recent releases, the plugin webpack bundle ships zero API keys or secrets

Yes. Gridavera’s dimension filtering system ensures each user only sees rows matching their assigned filter values. For example, a regional manager might only see data for their region, while a global manager sees everything.

Yes. Column editability is controlled at three levels:

1. The column must be marked as editable in the configuration
2. The user must have Edit permission on the view
3. Optionally, the column can be restricted to users with a specific role

IsLocked allows you to protect specific rows from editing. Rows with IsLocked = TRUE are displayed in grey and cannot be modified by regular users. This is useful for locking closed periods or approved records. Users with the “Unlock” permission can override this protection.

Gridavera supports optional column-level encryption using AES-256-GCM. When enabled, data is encrypted before writing to SharePoint and decrypted when loaded into Excel. The encryption key is stored in Azure Key Vault and never exposed in plaintext.

No. When column encryption is enabled, the data stored in SharePoint is ciphertext. Even users with full SharePoint admin access cannot read encrypted field values without the Gridavera encryption key.

Dimension lists are lookup tables that contain reference data — such as cost centers, product codes, regions, or GL accounts. They serve two purposes: providing dropdown validations in transaction lists and enforcing row-level security filters.

Yes. Users with the “Can Manage Dimensions” permission see a Dimensions tab in the plugin taskpane. They can load any dimension list, edit values, add new rows, delete rows, and submit changes — all from Excel.

Yes. Gridavera supports multiple sites under a single tenant. Each site has independent configuration, views, roles, and encryption settings. The number of sites is controlled by your subscription tier.

A site switcher dropdown appears in both the admin portal header and the Excel plugin taskpane. Users simply select the site they want to work with, and the configuration reloads automatically.

Gridavera creates its own configuration lists in your SharePoint site during setup. Your existing data lists are not modified — Gridavera reads and writes to them using standard SharePoint APIs.

Gridavera requires:

• User.Read: To identify the signed-in user
• Sites.Selected (or Sites.Read.All): To read/write SharePoint list data
• The specific permissions depend on your chosen write mode (Standard or Secure)

• Standard Mode: The plugin writes to SharePoint using the user’s own token. Simple setup, but users need direct write access to SharePoint lists.
• Secure Mode: All writes are routed through an Azure Function using app-only credentials. Users don’t need direct SharePoint write access, and all modifications are auditable through a single service principal.

Partially. Configuration and authentication are cached locally for a configurable grace period (default 24 hours). Users can open the plugin and see their views, but loading data and submitting changes require an internet connection.

Your data stays in your SharePoint Online environment. Gridavera does not copy or store your business data on external servers. See our Privacy Policy for the limited diagnostic exception. What Gridavera holds in its own backend is your tenant configuration (subscription status, site registrations, roles and per-user access settings) and an activity log of actions taken in the product.

Since your data remains in your own SharePoint Online tenant, it follows your organization’s Microsoft 365 data residency settings. Gridavera’s own backend, which holds your configuration and activity records, runs in the Azure UAE North region.

Yes. Gridavera works with Microsoft 365 guest (B2B) users. To give an external user access, your Microsoft 365 admin adds them as a guest in Azure AD (Microsoft Entra ID) and grants them access to the relevant SharePoint site. Then your Gridavera admin simply adds the guest’s email to the users list with the appropriate roles and dimension filters. The guest will have the same role-based access control as any internal user — they only see the data they are authorized to access.

• In-app: Click the “?” button in the Excel plugin to access the Help & Support panel. You can submit a support ticket directly from Excel — your session logs are attached automatically.
• Email: Contact support@gridavera.com
• Website: Visit www.gridavera.com for documentation and resources

Use the in-app support ticket feature (? button in the plugin). Your session logs are included automatically, which helps our team diagnose the issue quickly. Alternatively, email support@gridavera.com with a description of the issue.

Yes. The Help & Support panel in the plugin includes a Session Log viewer that shows all plugin activity with timestamps. You can copy the logs to your clipboard for sharing with support.