Five signs your business has outgrown its spreadsheets.

I come across so many businesses that have grown from an idea into a team of several people, with the whole thing glued together by spreadsheets. Sometimes lots of them, with data keyed from one spreadsheet into another, or from a system into a spreadsheet, into another spreadsheet and out into another system.

Spreadsheets are really good for starting out, and for organising simple sets of data. But once you have a reasonably complicated business and try to fit it into a spreadsheet, it becomes an absolute nightmare. You’re squeezing a square peg into a round hole.

The five signs

1. Keeping it all going takes hours

This is the biggest one, and it’s usually the first thing I notice: the amount of time spent on them. There’s so much manual effort in keeping spreadsheets up to date, and they still don’t do everything you need.

I’ve seen people spend days every month downloading data into a spreadsheet, mangling it with formulas and formatting it just how the board want their reports to look. With the right system, that becomes one automated job that pulls the data from each source and turns it into one beautiful report, and nobody has to touch it. That saves hours and hours every month.

2. You type the same information in more than once

Every time data is keyed from one place into another, something can go wrong. Data gets lost, the wrong figures go in, or someone changes a record in one place and not in the other.

3. Nobody’s sure which version is right

When the same customer, order or booking lives in three places, there’s no single source of truth. You can’t trust any one copy without checking the others.

4. Mistakes slip through

It’s so easy to make a mistake in a spreadsheet. A formula copied into the wrong cell, or not dragged down far enough, can completely mess up your data. There are no constraints and nothing sense-checking what goes in, so you’re relying on whoever set the spreadsheet up to have got it right. A proper system checks the data for you.

5. Only one person really understands it

Spreadsheets can get very complicated for doing very simple things. If the person who looks after yours is no longer around, unpicking it can be a real problem.

What it looks like in real life

I see this all the time, and not just in small businesses. One company I’m working with at the moment turns over millions of pounds a year and has proper software systems in place. But the only way those systems talk to each other is through spreadsheets, and people spend days fiddling around with data.

A medical staffing agency I worked with ran their whole business on a series of spreadsheets and a customer platform, and the two didn’t talk to each other. Data was always being typed out of the platform into the spreadsheets and back again. They literally had someone whose job was mostly moving data between systems for their reports. The plan was to bring everything into one platform and get rid of the spreadsheets, which would have saved almost a full-time job.

What to use instead

There are two routes: an off-the-shelf software package, or software built around how you work. Either can be a massive saving of time, effort and money.

Off-the-shelf tools have a real place. Pinder Aquatic Physio’s Squarespace website sends new referrals into their CRM through Zapier, and I’ve used Airtable a lot with PBG Pilates. It’s a great tool.

AI has changed things too. There’s often no need to pay for expensive plugins or tools when we can get AI to build exactly what you need, with no licence fees, and you have complete control over how it works. So there’s less and less need for off-the-shelf products. But you don’t want to reinvent the wheel either. If there’s something good out there already, I’ll use it.

What custom software costs

My custom software starts at £3,000. For that we’d have a discovery session, I’d write a spec of what you need, and then spend a couple of days building it. At that price it’s a small piece of software, usually something like connecting two systems so data moves from one to the other on its own.

That kind of job is quick these days. Most software has a well-documented API (the way one system talks to another), and AI tools understand them really well.

A bigger custom system, like a CRM built around your business, is more like £5,000 to £15,000, because it takes a lot longer. It’s all about time. Either way, you get a fixed written quote before any work starts.

Worried about switching?

I don’t think there’s anything to be nervous about. It’s all win-win.

Moving a complicated set of data from one system to another used to be a massive headache. Things have moved on: AI tools handle it really well, and they can build tests to make sure the move is smooth and accurate. When I moved Pinder Aquatic Physio onto their new system, we ran the old and new diaries side by side until they matched, then switched over.

And getting everything into one place is only the first phase. From then on you can automate more and run more smoothly, and with your systems talking to each other, you’ll spot chances to sell more and get a better return on what you spend. It’s the start of your business growing with technology.

Want a hand?

Tell me how your business runs today, spreadsheets and all, and I’ll tell you where the time is going and what would make the biggest difference. If an off-the-shelf tool would do the job, I’ll say so.