If you manage CMMC compliance, there's a good chance Excel is somewhere in your process.
This is understandable. Spreadsheets are familiar. They're flexible. They don't require a lengthy onboarding process, and nearly everyone on your team already knows how to use one. When organizations first start tackling CMMC or NIST 800-171 compliance, Excel often becomes the default tool for tracking controls, logging evidence, and monitoring status. And in the early stages, it actually works.
But as your compliance program grows, so do its demands — and that's where Excel starts to show its limits.
What Excel Gets Right
Before we talk about the problems, let's give credit where it's due. Excel has earned its place in the CMMC world for a reason.
It's customizable, widely accessible, and requires no vendor relationship or licensing complexity. Teams can build their own control trackers, color-code compliance statuses, and generate reports that look exactly the way they want them to. For organizations just beginning their CMMC journey, a well-built spreadsheet can provide a useful snapshot of where things stand.
That visibility — even if manual — is genuinely valuable. The impulse to reach for Excel makes sense.
Where Excel Falls Short
The problem isn't that Excel is a bad tool. The problem is that compliance — especially CMMC and NIST 800-171 — has outgrown what any spreadsheet can realistically handle.
With 110 controls across NIST 800-171, teams spend enormous time copying and pasting the same implementation statements, notes, and evidence references into multiple places. One update often means updating a dozen cells across several tabs or documents — and hoping nothing gets missed.
Excel can tell you a control is "Not Met," but it can't tell you what "Met" actually looks like, what evidence an assessor will expect, or how one control relates to another. Teams are left to figure that out on their own, often learning the hard way during an assessment.
Manual data entry means manual mistakes. A miscategorized control, an outdated status, a missed cell — any one of these can misrepresent where you actually stand.
Your CMMC status isn't static. The second a user changes a setting, a patch fails to apply, or a new device connects to your network, your actual compliance posture shifts — and your spreadsheet has no way of knowing. It only reflects the last time someone updated it.
For a CMMC Level 2 assessment, you need proof for all 110 controls. That means pulling data from systems, interviewing stakeholders, documenting configurations, and uploading files. Excel can track it, but it can't do it.
What ASCERA Does Differently
ASCERA was built to solve exactly these problems. And because every organization's compliance journey looks a little different, ASCERA offers three tiers — each one a meaningful step beyond what Excel can provide.
Purpose-built for CMMC. It eliminates the copy-paste grind by letting you enter information once and automatically mapping it across all 110 controls. Generates System Security Plans (SSPs) automatically, tracks your SPRS score over time with a color-coded dashboard, and includes assessor-created video explanations for every control. If Excel is a blank canvas, CUIComply is a structured, guided workflow designed specifically for CMMC.
Builds on everything in CUIComply and extends it across multiple DoD security frameworks within a single platform. For organizations managing more than just NIST 800-171, or RPOs supporting clients across several frameworks, ASCERA Advanced eliminates the need for separate spreadsheets per requirement set. Upload evidence once, and it automatically maps across every applicable control in every framework you're tracking.
Adds automated evidence collection and continuous controls monitoring. ConMon pulls system data directly from your environment, compares it against NIST standards and your own security policies, and flags the moment a control shifts from Met to Not Met. For teams that need to maintain and defend compliance continuously, ConMon is the answer.
There's a Tier for Where You're At
Not every organization needs the same solution on day one. What matters is that no matter where you are in your compliance journey — just getting started with CMMC, managing multiple frameworks, or maintaining continuous readiness — there's an ASCERA tier designed for that stage. And every tier is a significant improvement over managing compliance in a spreadsheet.
Excel will always have a place on your desktop. But your compliance program deserves a purpose-built platform.
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