Your Business Might Not Need to Replace That Spreadsheet
Spreadsheets can be surprisingly effective business tools. Discover when Excel or Google Sheets needs better automation rather than replacing the entire system.
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Somewhere in almost every small business, there's a spreadsheet doing a job it was never originally intended to do.
Perhaps it began as a simple list of customers. Then someone added a column for outstanding invoices, another for upcoming jobs, and eventually a collection of formulas that only one person in the office fully understands.
Before long, that spreadsheet has become an essential part of running the business.
And despite its occasional frustrations, it might actually be doing a perfectly reasonable job.
The problem isn't always that businesses rely on spreadsheets. It's that so much of the work surrounding them still happens manually.
When a useful spreadsheet becomes a daily chore
Imagine a hypothetical Wellington wholesale business using Excel to track incoming orders and stock levels. Each morning, someone downloads yesterday's orders, copies the relevant details into a spreadsheet and updates the quantities available.
Later, another employee checks the figures, corrects any discrepancies and prepares a summary for the owner.
The spreadsheet itself works well enough. It organises the information, performs calculations and provides a familiar way to review the business's activity.
What's inefficient is the repeated process of getting information into it.
This is where spreadsheet automation becomes useful.
Depending on the applications involved, an automated process could retrieve order information, update the appropriate records and prepare a report without requiring someone to copy and paste the same data each morning.
Excel and Google Sheets also offer built-in features for calculations, importing information and automating certain tasks. In some cases, those existing capabilities may be all that's needed.
The objective isn't necessarily to replace the spreadsheet.
It's to remove the repetitive work that has developed around it.
Not every spreadsheet should become an application
There's a temptation to assume that once a spreadsheet becomes important enough, it should be replaced with custom software.
Sometimes that's true.
A spreadsheet shared between several employees can become difficult to manage when people need different access permissions, reliable change histories or more complicated approval processes.
Problems can also arise when several people are editing information simultaneously, particularly if the workbook depends on delicate formulas or manual procedures.
In those situations, a dedicated application or database-backed system may provide a more appropriate foundation.
But replacing a familiar spreadsheet also introduces costs. Staff need to learn a new system, existing information may need migrating, and the replacement will require ongoing maintenance.
If the spreadsheet already handles the underlying process well, automating a few surrounding tasks may be a simpler approach.
For example, a business could keep its existing reporting workbook while automatically importing updated figures from another application. Or a Google Sheet might receive new customer enquiries directly from a website form rather than requiring manual entry.
The best option depends on what the spreadsheet is being asked to do.
Start with the work happening around the spreadsheet
Before deciding whether to automate or replace anything, look at how information enters and leaves your spreadsheets.
Where does the data come from? Who enters it? How often is it updated? What happens when someone makes a mistake?
You might discover that the biggest frustration isn't the spreadsheet at all, but the time spent preparing information for it.
A useful first step is to identify one repetitive task, document the process and investigate whether your existing software supports a reliable connection.
Not every spreadsheet can or should be automated. Poorly structured data, inconsistent formatting and complicated manual decisions can make automation more difficult than expected.
But where the process follows clear rules, there's often value in exploring whether some of the work could happen automatically.
A spreadsheet doesn't have to be replaced simply because it's become important. Sometimes it just needs a little help.
At Software Logic, I help New Zealand businesses explore spreadsheet automation, software integrations and custom development. If your team spends too much time updating Excel or Google Sheets, get in touch to discuss what might be possible.
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Have a question about your business? Talk to Liam.