What to do with 27 spreadsheets

When I ran my own company, I accumulated dozens of spreadsheets. A sales funnel, service tracking, a delivery schedule, margins, invoicing - each appeared because someone needed something right now. Had I counted them then, there would easily have been twenty-seven. Perhaps more.

The owners I speak to today give me that number almost identically: “we must have about thirty spreadsheets and nobody is on top of it any more”. And almost always that sentence is followed by the reflexive conclusion: we have to replace all of it with one system. It is precisely that conclusion that most often ends in failure.

Why replacing everything at once fails

The project “we will rewrite twenty-seven spreadsheets into one system” is big, expensive and long. It takes months before anything works at all. The team keeps working on the old spreadsheets in the meantime, so you have double the work and rising impatience. And because you are trying to reproduce everything at once, you reproduce the whole mess too - including the spreadsheets that were redundant anyway. I know companies that got stuck on such a project for a year and went back to Excel because “the system was not ready yet”.

There is a simpler route, and I always lead clients down it.

Step 1: sort the 27 spreadsheets into three piles

Before you build anything, go through the spreadsheets and split them into three groups. The first pile is the operational core - the spreadsheets the company truly lives on: orders, customers, production, service. There are usually surprisingly few, four to six.

The second pile is the supporting spreadsheets - reports, summaries, calculators someone makes now and then. Some of them are simply a view of the data from the first pile. The third pile is the dead spreadsheets - created for one occasion, then forgotten, unopened for months. Such a review usually shows that of twenty-seven spreadsheets only five really matter, and the rest are duplicates, out-of-date copies and files you can delete without regret.

Step 2: choose the one process that hurts most

From the first pile choose one process - the one that costs you the most stress and time. Usually it is order handling or the customer record. Not two. One.

Step 3: turn it into a single source of truth

Move that one process into a system so that it becomes the only place where those data live. From then on there is no “sales spreadsheet” and “accounting spreadsheet” with the same customer in two versions - there is one record, one entry, one truth, with a history of changes. Four to eight weeks, and the first module is working. That is all.

What happens to the rest of the spreadsheets

This is the most interesting part. Once one process has a source of truth, a good portion of the remaining spreadsheets disappears by itself. The summary someone glued together by hand from three files is now a single view in the system. The spreadsheet that existed only to reconcile two contradictory versions of the same data is no longer needed, because there is only one version now.

Some spreadsheets stay - and that is fine. Excel is excellent for working something out ad hoc, for a one-off simulation, for a quick summary on the fly. It only falls short where it is meant to coordinate people's work and serve as the company's memory. Let it do what it is good at, and move the rest to where it belongs.

Then you take the second process from the core. Then the third. The company pays in small decisions, each of which pays off before you make the next. My largest clients reached systems worth many times their first project this way over five years - but each began with one process and one spreadsheet that was no longer needed.

If you have your own twenty-seven spreadsheets and do not know where to start - write to me or book thirty minutes. Together we will pick the one that removes the most pain the fastest.