So far Your colleagues could spend days on fishing data from old softwares and big spreadsheets manually - but in a financial crisis You won’t have the resource for such stone-age method. As good as it gets - You have to give it a thought how long Your company can survive with the most expensive resource doing the dummest process: consolidating data form old SW’s and XLS’s?
Either to create an add-on to Your old software (JDE, Oracle, MS Navision, SAP etc.) or subsitute it - those who invests in taylor-made web-based business applications could expect lower HR costs and one-year ROI.