Excel-as-a-front-end hooks in so nicely and easily to SQL Server Standard via standard ODBC&#x2F;ConnectionStrings. You get audit tables, integration with Active Directory, SSRS, concurrent modifications, the ability to dynamically perform queries (i.e. [1], if you enable a filter clause on your projection from one of those DropDownLists, it will send it out to SQL Server and then return the resultset), audit trails, permissions, and most importantly you can set all of those NON NULL, FK, restraints at the database level, and use SQL Server Reporting Studio (comes with Standard) to perform your reporting. Priced out per CPU you can get it for under 10k. I&#x27;ve done it legally for free too[3] in my early years, but if your client won&#x27;t pay 10k for a RDBMS, you&#x27;ve got a tire-kicker who won&#x27;t respect net&#x2F;90 much less net&#x2F;30. I&#x27;ve done literally dozens of times for every type of industry you can imagine and I can count on my left hand the number of times those clients needed to later supplement their infrastructure with an actual data-warehouse. (Also the newer Excel versions allow data constraints to a certain degree, so you can avoid that unnecessary transaction&#x2F;lock acquisition in an anticipatory fashion.) Combine SSAS&#x2F;SSRS, and the free downloads of PowerPivot and PowerBI and you have a _very_ robust, flexible system that can handle millions of rows easily.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ablebits.com&#x2F;_img-blog&#x2F;find-duplicates-excel&#x2F;selected-data.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ablebits.com&#x2F;_img-blog&#x2F;find-duplicates-excel&#x2F;sel...</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;server-cloud&#x2F;products&#x2F;sql-server-editions&#x2F;sql-server-standard.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;server-cloud&#x2F;products&#x2F;sql-se...</a>
[3] SQL Server Express + the Express version of the Business Intelligence Suite was free for production use up to 4 GB and 2(?) processors [things might have changed since then, SQL Server 2008]. A few hundred lines of SP&#x27;s to dump stale data out and the client was golden.