7 signs your tracking spreadsheet has outgrown you

Almost every company starts by keeping its stock, orders or hours in a spreadsheet. It works well for a while, and it is the right call early on: you set it up in an afternoon, it costs nothing, and everyone already knows how to use it.

Then the company grows, and the file starts to creak. Usually not all at once — in pieces, in small things that do not seem connected to each other.

The signs we see most often:

1. The file has “final”, “v2” or a date in its name. If there is a stock_final_2.xlsx, there was also a stock_final.xlsx that someone thought was the last one. The names did not get complicated for no reason: every version appeared because two people needed the file at the same time.

2. Someone asks every week which copy is the current one. Each time a few minutes are lost, and not only for the person asking. Every so often someone works on the wrong version, and the work is done twice — the second time in a hurry, because a day has gone.

3. There is a column nobody fills in any more. And nobody deletes it, because no one remembers who used it or what for. That is how, over a few years, you end up with half a file that says nothing but that everyone scrolls past daily.

4. A formula has been showing an error for months. Everyone has learned to look somewhere else. The problem is not the error itself, but that nobody remembers what it was supposed to calculate, or whether the missing result feeds into something further down.

5. Two people cannot work in it at the same time. One opens the file, the other waits or makes a copy. That copy becomes, a few days later, sign number 1. It is the loop that keeps the whole thing turning.

6. When someone is on holiday, part of the records freeze. Because only they knew what was in those sheets and how they were filled in. Not out of secrecy — simply because no one ever had a reason to write down how it was done.

7. The last backup is a year old. Or nobody knows where it is. Worth asking plainly: if the file would not open tomorrow morning, how much would be lost, and how long to rebuild?

What it means

A spreadsheet does not remember who changed a value or when. It cannot stop a bad entry, such as a negative stock level or a delivery dated before its order. And it is built for one person at a time.

There are things a spreadsheet does not do, however well the file is built. While the company is small it does not matter — someone keeps it all in their head. Past a certain point it matters every day, because nobody holds the whole picture.

The moment it becomes obvious is usually the same: a wrong order goes out, or an invoice is sent twice, or an hour goes to hunting for something that should have taken a minute.

What to put in its place

Usually a small application, built around the way you already work. Not a system that changes how the company runs, but one that takes over what is done by hand today.

For a stock file, that means:

• every change has an author and a time, so you can answer “who changed this, and when”;
• stock goes down on its own when an order is recorded, instead of being entered a second time by someone;
• the rules live in the program: if a stock level is not allowed to go negative, it cannot;
• two people work at the same time without overwriting each other;
• the report that took the end of every month becomes a button.

It does not have to be a large project. Often the first version covers only what hurts now, takes a few weeks, and the rest is added when it is actually needed.

If you recognise three or four of the signs above, write to us. A short conversation is usually enough for us to tell whether it is a simple fix or something more.