When your company outgrows Excel (and when it has not)
Five signs your spreadsheet is holding the business back, and three situations where you should leave it alone. With a sum you can do this afternoon.
Almost every company I speak to has one file that has become too important. The planning, the calculation, the stock. It started as a tab to keep track of something and it now runs part of the business. The question is never whether Excel is bad, because it is not. The question is whether you have outgrown it.
The five signs
- Multiple versions exist and nobody knows which one is right. The moment a filename with _final_v3 is going around, someone is working in the wrong copy.
- One person understands the formulas. Years of logic sit hidden in there, and that knowledge lives in one head, not in a document.
- You retype the same details in several places. Customer in the sheet, customer in the accounting, customer in the inbox. Three places, three chances to get it wrong.
- Everyone sees everything. A sheet has no roles, so sharing it means sharing the margins, the purchase prices and the hourly rates too.
- You cannot see afterwards who changed what. That amount read differently last week and there is no trace.
One sign is an annoyance. Three is a cost. The difference is that the first two cost you time, while the last three can cost you money at a moment you never see coming: a wrong quote, an order shipped twice, a client seeing something that was not meant for them.
Do the sum properly, once
There are plenty of calculations online that price lost hours at a full billable rate. That is not honest: those hours do not leave your payroll once the system is there, they move to other work. So keep it simple. Count how many hours a week go into retyping, correcting and hunting for the right version. Multiply by your cost per hour, not by what you charge a client. Then look at what that is per year.
If you land under a thousand euros a year, this is a habit problem, not a software problem. If you land in the tens of thousands, the question is no longer whether you move but when.
A sheet that costs you two hours a week is irritating. A sheet nobody dares to change is a risk.
When to leave Excel exactly where it is
- One person works in it. Nearly everything that goes wrong in a sheet starts with the second user.
- The process is not settled yet. Pouring software over a way of working that changes next month is expensive concrete.
- It is calculation, not administration. For running a scenario or a one-off analysis, a spreadsheet is still the best tool there is.
That last one matters more than it sounds. Losing Excel as a calculator is rarely the intention. What you want to replace is the sheet doing duty as a database, with rows you maintain rather than compute.
What to do instead
Not convert the whole file at once. Start with the part that costs the most: the process the most people work in at the same time, or where a mistake costs money directly. That is usually one of four tabs, not all fourteen. The rest can stay until its turn comes, and sometimes that is never.
How that switch runs in practice, from sheet to data model to a system your team works in, is on from spreadsheets to software. Still weighing a no-code tool against having something built? Read Airtable, Notion or custom after all first.