In short
- The warning sign is the same information typed in more than one place.
- Measure for one ordinary week before deciding anything.
- Fix one process at a time, starting with the one that costs the most.
Seven signs
- The same customer, horse or field appears in three tabs, spelled three ways.
- One person "knows the spreadsheet", and things stop when they are away.
- Month-end takes days, because the numbers are rebuilt from several files.
- "What did we sell last month?" takes an afternoon to answer.
- Copies of the file travel by email, and nobody is sure which one is current.
- There are formulas nobody dares to touch.
- The spreadsheet decides who gets called back, because the list of open inquiries lives in it.
Two or three of these are normal for a growing operation. Five or more usually means the spreadsheet has become the system, without the safeguards a system has: a record of who changed what, control over who may see what, and a plan for two people editing at once.
Measure it for a week
Before deciding anything, keep a simple tally for one ordinary week:
- every time someone types information that already exists somewhere else;
- every time someone has to ask a colleague where something is;
- every mistake that reaches a customer or a bill.
Note the minutes each one takes. The totals are more useful than anyone's opinion, ours included. The time-back calculator does the arithmetic if you want it.
What to do next
- Map the process that hurts most, from first contact to payment, on one page. The next guide shows how.
- Decide which system is the source of truth for each kind of record: customers, bookings or orders, stock, invoices. One place for each.
- Move one process at a time. A big switch-over in the busy season is how good projects go wrong.
When a spreadsheet is still the right tool
A spreadsheet is fine when one person owns it, nothing else depends on it, and the job is thinking rather than running the day: a budget, a one-off price comparison, a planting plan you sketch before you commit. Keep those. The problem is not the spreadsheet. It is asking one file to be the booking system, the customer list and the books at once.
