Five signs your business has outgrown spreadsheets
Spreadsheets got most businesses this far. Here are five signs they are now costing you more than they save, and what to do first.
By Luke Buckley6 minute read
Spreadsheets are not the problem. Most of the businesses I have run and worked in were built on them, and for a long time they were the right tool: cheap, flexible and understood by everyone.
The trouble starts when the business grows and the spreadsheets do not. You add a column, then a tab, then a second file that copies the first. Nobody decides to build a fragile system. It just accumulates. These are the five signs I look for that it has gone past the point where it is saving you time.
Your figures take a week to compile
If answering “how did we do last month?” means exporting bank statements, pasting them into a workbook and fixing the formulas that broke, you are paying someone to rebuild the same report every month. By the time it is ready, the month it describes is already history.
The fix is not a prettier spreadsheet. It is reports that build themselves from the source data, so the question gets answered on the first of the month, not the eighth.
At Sunbird Solar, where I work as the systems and operations consultant, I built a dashboard that reads the bank statements directly. It parsed 22,786 transactions and reconciles every statement to R0.00, so the figures are ready without anyone compiling them.
The same data is typed into three places
A customer’s details go into the quote, then the job sheet, then the invoice. A supplier’s price goes into an email, then a costing sheet, then a purchase order. Every time someone retypes something, it takes time and it creates a chance for an error.
Count the places one piece of information is typed in your business. If the answer is more than one, that is a job for a system: enter it once, and let everything else read from there.
A quick way to put a number on it: pick one job from last month and follow it from enquiry to paid invoice. Note every time someone typed, copied or pasted the same details, and roughly how long each took. Most owners are surprised by the total, and by how many of those steps exist only because two spreadsheets cannot see each other.
Nobody trusts the numbers without checking them
This one is expensive and quiet. A manager gets a figure, does not quite believe it, and spends an hour checking it before using it. Multiply that by every report and every manager.
Numbers lose trust when nobody can see where they came from. A good system shows its working: every figure traces back to a bank line, an invoice or a message. The dashboard I built for Sunbird goes further and hides any figure it cannot defend, rather than showing a number someone has to second-guess.
Supplier prices live in emails
If finding the best price for an item means searching your inbox and WhatsApp for the last quote, you are almost certainly paying more than you need to. Prices go stale, nobody notices the cheaper supplier, and the person who knows where everything is becomes a bottleneck.
Sunbird’s suppliers sent prices in different formats by email and WhatsApp. The procurement portal I built turned 555 supplier price lines into 364 comparable ones, and showed 146 items quoted by two or more suppliers, so the cheaper option is visible for each.
Month-end depends on one person
Every business has someone who knows how the spreadsheets really work. When they are on leave, month-end waits. When they leave, it breaks.
That is not a criticism of the person. It is a sign the process lives in their head rather than in a system. Writing it down helps; building it so it runs without them helps more.
When a spreadsheet is still the right answer
Not every spreadsheet needs replacing. If one person owns it, the data goes in once, it takes minutes rather than hours, and nobody needs it while that person is away, leave it alone. A well-kept spreadsheet is cheaper than any system.
The test is not how many spreadsheets you have. It is how many hours a month go into keeping them right, and what a mistake in them costs you. If both numbers are small, spend your money elsewhere.
What a fix costs and how long it takes
The fix is usually smaller than people expect, because it starts with the task that costs the most hours rather than with everything at once. At Lockhart, an automation sprint that takes one workflow off your desk, such as quotes or a reporting feed, starts at R38,500 and takes 2 to 4 weeks.
An owner’s dashboard with reporting and a board pack, built on your own data, costs R65,000 to R180,000 and takes 4 to 8 weeks. A portal, such as procurement or a client or supplier portal, costs R95,000 to R350,000 and takes 6 to 12 weeks. All of these are fixed prices, agreed in writing before work starts, and paid 40% to start, 40% at the working review and 20% at go-live.
What to do first
Do not start by buying software. Start by finding out where the hours actually go. A Systems & AI Review takes two weeks and costs R24,500 (US$1,580). It maps how work and money move through your business, counts the hours each manual task costs every month, and gives you a costed plan: what to build first, what it costs and when it pays back. If you start a build within 60 days, the fee is credited in full. You can read how the Review works.
And look at the system your customers see first: your website. The free Website Check scores it out of 100 and tells you the three fixes that matter most.