There's a smarter way to handle rolling cashflow projections, and it doesn't require wrestling with INDIRECT and nested INDEX-MATCH formulas in a manual spreadsheet. The user here has built a reasonable workaround, an override tab that feeds corrections into a data dump, but the real problem isn't the conditional formatting trick. It's that the entire process is still anchored to a tool designed for static analysis, not dynamic forecasting.
What this user describes is a familiar pain: you export from dedicated cashflow software, then spend hours "making it pretty" and manually editing figures. You build clever workarounds like override tabs, but you're still fighting the spreadsheet's limitations. The goal is to know which numbers came from the override, so you can audit your changes. That's a legitimate need, but trying to solve it with ISBLANK and conditional formatting on a million-row range is a sign that the tool is working against you, not for you.
The practical takeaway is this: if you're spending time on workarounds like this, you're not doing forecasting, you're maintaining a spreadsheet. A cashflow projection should be a living model that absorbs external inputs and flags overrides automatically, without requiring you to master INDIRECT or debug INDEX-MATCH syntax. The user's override tab approach is clever, but it's a patch. The real solution is a system that treats overrides as first-class data, not as exceptions you have to hunt for with conditional formatting.
For anyone facing this same monthly grind, the question isn't how to make the spreadsheet highlight overrides. It's whether the spreadsheet should be the center of your forecasting process at all. An AI-native tool can handle the data merging, flag the overrides, and let you focus on what the numbers mean, not on how to make them visible. That's the shift worth exploring.