Guides
Moving your business off spreadsheets without stopping work
The spreadsheet got you this far, and it was a sensible choice. This guide is about moving the next step on without a big bang, a lost week or a team that quietly goes back to the old file.
Why the spreadsheet worked
Spreadsheets run a great many good businesses. Everybody knows how to use one, nobody needs permission to add a column, and the person who built it understands every corner. For years that flexibility is exactly what a growing business needs.
Wanting something more is not an admission that the sheet failed. It is usually just that more people now need it at once, or that you want to know what it said last Tuesday, or that the totals at month end take longer than they used to. Any of those is reason enough.
What actually changes
A system is not a smarter spreadsheet. The difference is that each job, container or asset becomes one record, written as the work happens by whoever does it, with a history of who changed what and when. Two people can work on it at the same time. Something parked too long can flag itself instead of being spotted by luck.
What stays the same is the work. The stages should keep the names your office already uses out loud, and the columns people rely on should still be there, just in a form that cannot be accidentally sorted into nonsense.
Start with one job
Do not try to move everything at once. Pick the sheet that everybody opens first thing in the morning, the job list, the hire register, the board of what is out where, and move that first.
A first system that does one thing properly is live in weeks rather than months. Once it is in daily use, the next sheet follows, and the team already knows how the new system behaves. Our guide on how long bespoke software takes explains why going live in pieces is quicker overall.
Run alongside, then switch off
For the first week, keep the spreadsheet going beside the new system. It feels like double work, and for a few days it is, but it means nobody is forced into anything overnight and every figure can be checked against something people already trust.
When the two agree and the team stops opening the old file, make the sheet read-only and keep it somewhere safe. Do not delete it. It is your record of how things were, and somebody will want to look something up in it eventually.
Cleaning the data
This is the part most people underestimate. A sheet that has been added to for years usually holds some of these:
- The same customer under several spellings, "Smith Bros" and "Smith Brothers Ltd".
- Dates typed as text, or in two different formats.
- Colours that mean something, but only to the person who chose them.
- A notes column holding the real status of the job.
- Merged cells, hidden rows and a tab nobody remembers creating.
None of that is a mistake. It is what happens when a tool is used hard. It does need sorting before the move, and the best person to decide which "Smith" is which is somebody in your office, not us.
Decide what comes across. Open jobs and live customers always. Closed work where there is a reason to keep it, such as warranty periods or repeat customers. Old records that nobody looks at can stay in the archived sheet. You should know what will come across cleanly before you commit.
Who should be involved
- The person who built the sheet. They know why every column exists, including the odd ones.
- The people who type into it every day. If the new screens are slower for them, they will go back to the old file.
- The person who reads the totals. Usually an owner or manager, who needs the month end figures to come out the same or better.
- One decision maker. Somebody who can settle "do we do it this way or that way" in a day rather than a fortnight.
If the person who built the sheet has moved on, that is fine. The people using it now know how it is really used, which matters more.
What this means for you
Pick the one sheet the business leans on most. Get the people who use it in a room for an hour and write down the stages, the columns that matter and the ones nobody uses. That list is most of the brief for a first system, and it is useful even if you do nothing else.
Job trackers and registers very often start as exactly this kind of sheet. If you would like to talk yours through, get in touch. Even a screenshot of the spreadsheet helps.
Questions people ask
Do we have to stop using Excel altogether?
No. The records that run the business move into the system, but people still use spreadsheets for one-off sums and analysis. Your data can be exported in a standard format whenever you ask, so a spreadsheet is never out of reach.
Will our history come across?
As much of it as is worth having. Open jobs and live customers always, closed work where there is a reason to keep it. The old sheet stays as a read-only archive for everything else.
What if the team keeps going back to the spreadsheet?
That usually means the new screen is slower than the old one for somebody. It is a reason to change the screen, not to blame the person, which is why the people who use it every day should review it before go-live.
Talk to us
Tell us which spreadsheet the business leans on and what you would like it to do that it cannot. That is usually enough for us to say whether we can help.
Ring, 8am to 6pm Monday to Friday and Saturday mornings, or use the form below. Pick what you'd like to keep track of, add a line if you want to, and leave a name and a way to reach you.