When the spreadsheet stops being enough

Almost every small business starts with a spreadsheet. One product per row, a column for quantity, a column for price. It works, it is free, and it takes an hour to learn.

The problem is not that a spreadsheet is a bad tool. The problem is that it never tells you when it has stopped being enough. There is no error message, no warning. One day you simply notice that you are staying later than you used to.

Below are the four signs that mark this moment. If none of them sounds familiar, your spreadsheet is doing its job and there is no reason to touch it.

1. The same thing gets entered twice

The sale goes through the till. Then the same sale is written into the spreadsheet, so that stock stays up to date.

Double entry looks like a small waste of time, but that is not what it is. It is where the errors come from — because sooner or later somebody will skip the second entry. Not out of carelessness, but because they were busy.

From that moment the numbers stop agreeing, and nobody knows which of the two is the right one.

The test: if someone in your company regularly copies data from one place to another, that is not work. That is a patch over a missing connection between two systems.

2. The number on the screen no longer matches the shelf

You open the spreadsheet: it says 14. You walk to the stockroom: there are 9.

The usual reaction is to do a stock count and make the numbers agree. That helps for a week. A month later the gap is back, because the cause was never in the numbers — it was in how they get updated: by hand, after the work is done, from memory.

Stock that is tracked separately from sales will always lag behind. The only question is by how much.

3. The file lives with one person

There is one spreadsheet. It sits on one computer. One person understands it.

That person goes on holiday and work slows down. They fall ill and nobody dares touch the file. They leave, and half the order in your company walks out with them.

This rarely feels like a technical problem until it happens. By then it is too late to solve it calmly.

4. Pulling the report takes longer than acting on it

You want to see the ten best-selling items from last month. The answer is somewhere in the data — but getting it out means forty minutes of digging, copying and adding up.

When a question costs half an hour, you stop asking it. And you start deciding by feel, even though you have the data.

This is the most expensive of the four signs, because it shows up nowhere. You do not lose money on an error — you lose it on decisions you never made.

When a spreadsheet is still the right answer

Honestly, in many cases it is, and replacing it would be a waste of money.

Stay with a spreadsheet if:

• you work alone or there are two of you and you see each other daily;
• you have dozens of products or clients, not thousands;
• your process still changes often and has not settled;
• none of the four things above has happened to you.

Software is built to settle a process that is already clear. If the process is still being worked out, software will simply freeze it in the wrong shape — and you will pay twice: once to build it, once to rebuild it.

What comes after the spreadsheet

Three options, cheapest first. The middle one is skipped most often, and it is precisely the one that suits most small companies.

The first option is worth checking seriously before considering the others. If your problem is solved by an off-the-shelf product for a few euros a month, you are better off hearing that from us than paying for something you did not need.

Custom software makes sense when the ready-made solution would force you to change how you work — and that way of working is the reason clients come to you.

How to move across without stopping work

The most common fear is that switching means a month of chaos. It does not, if it is done in stages.

1. The most painful part first. Not the whole company at once, but one thing — usually whatever is being entered twice.
2. Old data is carried over. The spreadsheet is not retyped; it is transferred.
3. Both run side by side for a while. A week or two, until it is clear the new one gives the same numbers.
4. The spreadsheet stays as an archive. It is not deleted. You will need it to check something further back.

Done in this order, there is no day when work stops. There are a few weeks when it runs in two places.

One example

A shop that worked exactly like this: the till on its own, stock in a notebook and a spreadsheet, the daily report added up by hand after closing. One sale was entered twice — once at the till, once for stock. Which is why what the numbers said and what was on the shelf never quite matched.

Today the cashier scans and sells. Nothing is written twice, stock keeps itself, the daily report comes out with one press. The internet can go down and the till keeps working, because the data is on site.

If you want the details, the case is written up here.

If this sounds like you

You do not need to decide right away whether you need software. The first step is smaller: write down exactly what is being entered twice, and how long it takes per week.

That number usually comes as a surprise.

If you would like us to work it out with you, get in touch. We will look at your process and tell you honestly which of the three options is yours — including if it turns out to be the cheapest one.