Quick question. How many spreadsheets is your business genuinely running on right now?
Not the ones that hold numbers for the accountant. The ones that quietly track jobs, plans, assets, training records, holiday, snagging, suppliers, customer lists, projects, certifications.
The workbooks somebody opens first thing every morning. The ones that need a phone call to the person who owns them when something doesn’t look right.
If you can think of three or four straight away, that’s a normal answer.
If you can think of ten, you’re not alone. But it might be a sign that it’s time to look at whether there’s a simpler way.
How businesses end up here
Nobody plans to run a business on a stack of spreadsheets. It happens because Excel is brilliant, it’s flexible, it’s familiar, everyone has it and when something needs tracking quickly it is almost always the fastest place to start.
The trouble is that the spreadsheet that was a quick fix for a problem six months ago is now the system of record for that part of the business.
Then the next problem turns up, and the next one and now there are workbooks running quietly all over the business that nobody has ever stepped back to look at together.
The hidden cost of running on spreadsheets
Spreadsheets do not look risky until you list out what is actually true about them.
- One person owns it
- If they are off, on holiday or leave the business, the spreadsheet goes with them.
- Nobody knows which copy is right
- Once it goes round by email, you have versions on laptops, in inboxes, in OneDrive, on the file server and on someone’s phone
- There is no audit trail
- If a number changes, you cannot tell who changed it, when or why
- It cannot be permission controlled properly
- Either everyone who has the file can see everything in it, or you end up with three different versions for three different audiences
- It cannot drive anything
- A spreadsheet doesn’t send a notification, doesn’t trigger an approval and doesn’t talk to anything else.
- It cannot scale
- The spreadsheet that works for ten jobs falls over at a hundred
For any business chasing growth, working towards ISO 9001or already holding it, this is a serious gap between how the business actually runs and what an auditor or insurer is looking for.
Signs you’ve outgrown the spreadsheet
You probably already know which spreadsheets are creaking.
The common signs are
- It syncs via OneDrive and is forever out of sync or changes are overwritten
- You email a copy to anyone who needs it, then have to consolidate changes back
- The workbook breaks when more than one person has it open
- A new starter takes a week before they understand which version to use
- You’ve added so many sheets that finding the right one is a job on its own
- You audit changes by asking people what they did
If two or three of those sound familiar for one of your workbooks, that’s the one to look at first.
What life looks like on the other side
You don’t need to replace every spreadsheet at once and you don’t need a new system to do it.
The tools to move on are very likely already included in the Microsoft 365 subscription you’re already paying for.
In practical terms, the spreadsheet becomes a SharePoint List. The data still looks familiar, but it lives in one central place with proper permissions, version history and the ability to be filtered and viewed differently by different people.
If the data is captured from the team, Microsoft Forms drops responses straight into the list.
If something needs to happen when a record changes, an approval, a notification, a status update then Power Automate handles it.
The day-to-day experience for people using it is often simpler than the spreadsheet was.
The difference is that the business is no longer relying on a workbook that lives on one person’s laptop.
Where to start
The biggest mistake is trying to do it all at once.
Pick the single spreadsheet that causes the most pain or carries the most risk, usually the one that runs a critical process, has the most people touching it, or is the one you’d struggle to recreate if it disappeared.
Get that one moved properly. The rest become much easier once you’ve done the first.
If you’re not sure which of your workbooks should be first, or whether the tools you need are already on your Microsoft 365 subscription then give us a call and we’ll take a look with you.
Whatever your IT question – big or small – drop us a message or give us a call.
We’ll make sure you get a straightforward answer without the tech-speak.