A spreadsheet is often the right tool
Excel is very good software. It is flexible, everybody already has it, and a competent person can build something useful in an afternoon. For a price list, a one-off analysis or a tracker that two people update now and then, replacing it with an application would cost more than it ever saves.
So we will not tell you to get rid of a spreadsheet because it is a spreadsheet. The question is whether it is still doing the job of a spreadsheet, or whether it has quietly become the system the business runs on.
The signs it has stopped being one
These tend to arrive together:
- Several people edit it, and they collide. Somebody saves over somebody else's changes, or there are three copies with dates in the filename and nobody is sure which is current.
- It only works if you know the rules. Which columns not to touch, which colour means paid, which tab is out of date. The rules live in one person's head, and that person takes holidays.
- It is fed by retyping. Information arrives on paper, in an email or in a WhatsApp group, and someone in the office types it in later. Every retype is a chance to get it wrong, and the sheet is always a few days behind.
- Simple questions take an hour. Which jobs are overdue, which customer owes what, which vehicle keeps coming back damaged. The data is in there somewhere, but getting an answer means filtering, copying and checking.
- Nobody can see who changed what. When a figure is wrong, there is no history to tell you how it got that way.
One of these is an annoyance. Three or four means the spreadsheet is costing you more than a proper system would.
What we have replaced
For a field maintenance operation, engineers were filling in paper job sheets that came back at the end of the week and were then typed into Excel. The replacement is an installable mobile app that works in basements and plant rooms with no signal, and gives the office a record it can rely on while the engineer is still on site. We were the lead contributor on that build rather than the only one, and owned the offline behaviour and the data model underneath it.
For a taxi fleet, vehicle damage was tracked in a shared spreadsheet with photographs scattered across a WhatsApp group. Curbed replaced it with a QR sticker in every car: the driver scans, photographs and submits, and the report becomes a job with an owner and a status. It is live with a Dutch taxi operator.
For a construction and M&E group, the estimating process was held together by spreadsheets and an ageing desktop tool. It is now part of a suite of eight applications on one platform.
What replaces it
Not a copy of the spreadsheet with a login screen. The useful part of the work is going back to what the sheet was actually for, and building that:
- A real database (PostgreSQL) underneath, so a job, a customer or a vehicle exists once and everything else refers to it
- Forms that only accept sensible input, so a date is a date and a status is one of the statuses you have agreed
- Roles, so the engineer, the office and the owner each see and change what they should
- A history of every change and who made it
- Reports that answer the questions you actually ask, on the day you ask them
- Export back to CSV or Excel, because somebody will still want to do their own analysis, and they should be able to
It runs in a browser, and on a phone where that is where the work happens.
Moving the data across
Your existing sheets are the best specification you have. They show the fields that matter, the exceptions people have worked around, and the columns that were added in a hurry and never used again. We import the historical data as part of the build, clean it where it needs cleaning, and flag the rows that do not fit rather than silently dropping them.
The most useful hour in the whole project is usually spent with whoever lives in the spreadsheet now. They know where it goes wrong.
What it costs
Fixed price, off a written scope, before anything is built. Engagements start from £4,000, and most first builds of a real business system land between £8,000 and £15,000. A focused replacement for one well-understood spreadsheet sits at the lower end; a sheet that turns out to be running five different processes sits higher, and we will tell you which yours is before you commit. The code, the hosting and the data are in your name from the start.
If you are not sure whether to build or buy, the bespoke vs off-the-shelf guide is a fair place to start. If you already know the spreadsheet has to go, send us a description of it.