5 signs your company has outgrown Excel

Before I founded GoIDEA, I ran a company of a hundred people. With B2B contracts running to eight figures. Back then I accumulated dozens of spreadsheets of my own — the sales funnel, service tracking, the delivery schedule, margins, invoicing. Each one appeared because someone needed something right away. Each one started working for itself. Each one had a life of its own within a few months.

For a long time I resisted the verdict that it had become too much. Excel is cheap, familiar, everyone knows how to use it. The technology was never the problem — we simply had not organised ourselves yet. I told myself that for two years. And then, at a board meeting, I noticed two managers presenting two different results for the same month. Each from a different spreadsheet. Each convinced he was right.

Today, when I talk to owners of companies with 20–250 people, I hear the same moment described in different words. Every company grows to a scale where Excel stops being a tool and starts being a problem. Spreadsheets in themselves are fine — the point is that certain signs cannot be ignored. I have written down the five I see most often.

1. The order lost in a spreadsheet

A customer calls and asks whether their order has been accepted. An employee starts searching. In one spreadsheet he finds an entry from a week ago, in the second there is nothing, in the third someone has already marked it 'done', but cannot remember when or by whom. The customer waits on the line for four minutes. The first sign that the company is working against itself.

A spreadsheet has no audit trail. You have no idea who added what, who deleted what, or when. In a system, that information is there by default. It is basic operational hygiene.

2. Two sources of truth about the same customer

Sales has 'its' customer spreadsheet. Accounting has 'its own'. Marketing has a third one, with the mailing list. In one the customer is called 'Kowalski Ltd', in the second 'Kowalski ltd', in the third 'Kowalski's company'. To your company these are three different businesses, even though it is one customer.

The consequence: a year from now you run a sales report and cannot tell how much Kowalski has actually bought from you. And two years from now the company grows, five new salespeople join, each sets up a spreadsheet of their own — and you repeat the same thing at a larger scale.

3. The static report that is three days old

Every Monday morning you receive the sales report for the previous week. Someone prepared it on Friday evening. The weekend passes, Monday morning passes — and it turns out three orders have changed, one customer has pulled out, two prices were entered incorrectly. The report you are being shown is already three days old and carries seven corrections you cannot see.

Running a company on a report from three days ago means running the company with a delay. Few decisions can be postponed by three days at no cost. Every hour of delay is an hour in which an employee decides on his own, based on what he happens to remember.

4. Wrong prices in quotes

The price list lives in one spreadsheet. The salespeople prepare quotes in a second one, copying the prices by hand. Once a quarter someone updates the price list, but only the salespeople who happened to be in the office that day hear about the update. The rest keep using the old prices for another three weeks.

According to research, 90% of spreadsheets contain errors. I put little faith in a single statistic — but I do believe what I see at my clients'. Every company that started working with me on an Excel audit found at least one line item with a pricing mistake that had cost it real money.

5. The employee has no idea what to do tomorrow

The highest alarm level. An employee arrives at the office in the morning and cannot tell whether to carry on with what he finished yesterday, or with what came in by email this morning, or with what the boss said on Friday at 4 p.m. Because each of those pieces of information lives in a different place.

A growing company needs one place where the work happens — more than it needs another set of procedures. Excel will never build that place, because it was made for calculating, and coordinating people is an entirely different job.

What to do as a first step

Do not replace everything at once. That is the most common mistake. Pick the one process that hurts you most — usually it is order handling or the CRM — and start there. Four to eight weeks, and the first module is up and running. You add the rest gradually, as the company grows and new needs appear.

My biggest clients started exactly this way. Their first projects had a budget the size of one month's salary of their finance director. Five years on, they have systems worth half a million — but every single decision along the way was a small one.

If any of these five signs sounds familiar — get in touch. Let's spend thirty minutes talking about which process hurts most in your company and what can be done about it fastest.