Almost no company decides to run on spreadsheets. You end up there gradually: the system didn't cover something, someone put together an Excel file to solve it, and over the years that parallel layer became the real system. It works, but it depends on the people who know how to use it.
Does any of this sound familiar?
- There's an important piece of data living in a spreadsheet that only one person handles.
- Every month-end close means redoing the same manual work to pull the numbers together.
- Answering one question means opening three files and an old email.
- When someone takes time off, part of the process stalls.
- The same data gets entered more than once, in different places.
- If the volume doubled, you'd have to add people to keep up.
- Nobody can say for certain where something stands without asking someone else.
If three or more of these are true, the cost isn't the time: it's that the process depends on people's memory, not on a system. That can be measured, and that's the first step.