The spreadsheet as a company register: how to tell it has stopped working

Let us start with something you will not hear from a software vendor: the spreadsheet is excellent. It calculates, filters and sorts, everybody knows it, and it needs no implementation. Half the companies in the country run on spreadsheets and there is nothing shameful about that.

The problem with a spreadsheet as a company register is not that it is a bad tool. It is that it is invisible to the rest of the company. Which is why the moment it stops working has nothing to do with the number of rows.

Seven signs

Each appears on its own and none of them is a catastrophe. Three at once mean the spreadsheet has stopped being a tool and started being a risk.

1. The filename has a suffix. Contract_register_final_2_fix.xlsx. Nobody is entirely sure which version is authoritative, so somebody confirms it by e-mail before every use.

2. The notes column has become the case history. It holds everything: things agreed by phone, dates, first names, reasons for delay. Knowledge that cannot be searched or counted.

3. Colour coding stands in for stages. Yellow means waiting on the client, red means urgent, green means done. A new team member learns this over a week and still asks what orange is for.

4. One person is the bottleneck. Everyone asks her about status, because only she knows what a given row actually means. When she is on holiday, the company slows down.

5. There is no deadline that reminds anyone of itself. A date in a cell notifies nobody. Deadlines are met because somebody remembers them, which works until the first difficult week.

6. Permissions are all or nothing. Either somebody sees the whole file or none of it. There is no way to show a person their own cases without showing them everyone else's rates and margins.

7. The report is assembled by hand once a month. Somebody spends half a day on it, and the result still describes the state of affairs a fortnight ago.

The real turning point

None of those signs sounds like a crisis. The crisis looks like this: somebody outside the team, a client, the board, the accountants, asks what stage a particular case is at. And the answer is: ask Kasia.

That is precisely the boundary. The spreadsheet stopped working not because it grew too large, but because it became one person's private tool inside a process that belongs to the whole company.

Three things a spreadsheet will never give you

This is not about missing features. It is about things it will not do by its nature.

• Who changed what, and when. File version history is not the same as row history. A year later you will not reconstruct who corrected an amount, or on what basis.

• Who decided. An approval in a spreadsheet is a typed-in name. It is not a trace of a decision, only a note about one, and anybody can type it.

• What happens on its own. A spreadsheet starts nothing: it will not send a reminder, pass a case on, or create a task. Every move has to be made by a person who remembers to make it.

Honestly: when a spreadsheet is entirely enough

Not every register needs moving into a system, and most implementations I have seen were too broad rather than too narrow.

A spreadsheet is perfectly adequate when one person keeps it for themselves, when the data carries no deadlines, when nobody outside asks about status, and when it holds nothing that everyone in the company could not see. A one-off analysis, a list of ideas, an event budget. Leave those in the spreadsheet and go and do something more important.

Moving that sort of thing into a system ends with somebody keeping the spreadsheet alongside it anyway, except that now they have two things to fill in.

A first step that is not a major implementation

The worst reaction to this piece is a resolution to digitise every register in the company. That is how projects begin that run for a year and end with everyone back in the spreadsheet.

A sensible first step is narrow and has three elements.

1. One register. The one people most often ask about with the words “what stage is this at”. Usually contracts, complaints or support requests.

2. One process. Four or five stages, with no exceptions to start with. Exceptions get added after a month, once you can see which ones are real.

3. One person responsible. Not a project team. One person who decides what the form looks like and which stage is unnecessary.

After two weeks of running such a register, two things become visible: how many cases genuinely pass through the company, and where they sit longest. That second piece of information is usually worth more than the entire spreadsheet it replaced.

In summary

A spreadsheet stops working at the moment the process stops belonging to one person. Not earlier, and not because of its size.

If you recognise three of the signs on that list, you do not need a large project. You need one register kept in such a way that the answer to a question about a case does not begin with somebody's first name.