Top 5 Signs Your Spreadsheets Are No Longer Cutting It

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Since the late 1980s, businesses have increasingly been using spreadsheets for their critical business processes. People have become so familiar with spreadsheets that they are applied to almost every aspect of business - at times even to entirely unsuitable applications and business-critical processes.

A whitepaper produced by IBM last year entitled "The Risks of Using Spreadsheets for Statistical Analysis" revealed some scary facts:

• 90% of mission critical spreadsheets contained errors
• 30% of attempts at fixing these errors resulted in further errors  

This isn't hard to believe; we too have seen many a mid-sized firm compensate for a lack of proper systems by papering over the cracks with spreadsheets. Even though they weren't made for supporting complex business processes, we've got so used to them that we immediately revert to them when building a workflow system. That may work for a small business, but as the company grows, problems arise. It gets to the point where spreadsheets do more harm than good. The most common problems that crop up are:

1. As the organisation grows, more people need access in order to reference or contribute to the spreadsheet. This usually leads to errors, especially with new staff who are only just beginning to understand how to use it. To combat these errors, one person is usually assigned the task of managing the overall spreadsheet. But what happens when that person goes on holiday or worse still; leaves? Does anyone else know how to use and maintain it properly?
2. The more complex the business process gets, the harder the spreadsheet is to use. Changing a formula on sheet 10 means that a cell now needs to be changed on sheet 3, and so on. Interlinking macros and features are introduced to ease use by automating formulas, but making a change is now a hassle, complicated and often just plain dangerous.
3. Remote workers or those working at different branches are excluded from the workflow, as it's virtually impossible to share with them. Of course, there are workarounds such as Google Docs, but the risk there is that changes made are immediately saved - there's no way to see what was changed or to undo changes made by another user. The only other option is to save multiple versions of a single spreadsheet (usually by adding "version 1" or "version 2" in the title), but this is hard to keep track of from a distance. What if 2 people create a "version 2"? Which one is the most up to date?
4. There's no concept of access control, where you only give staff access to data that they need for work as opposed to the entire dataset. This saves their time having to wade through irrelevant data. Having everything accessible to everyone regardless of what they actually need to know to do their job is not ideal for IT security, either.
5. Clinging to spreadsheets out of habit and comfort, even though it means your business process isn't as efficient or easy as you would like it to be. You're well aware a database may do a better job of executing these business processes, but change is scary both in the sense of cost and implementation, plus it's hard to know where to start.

The Solution

 The solution to these problems is to create a secure web-based database that:

• multiple people and devices can access
• generate a specific to-do list for each individual
• require very little direct supervision to get efficient and accurate data
• allow managers to see each individual's on-the-job performance
• automate workflow allocation

There is little doubt that many of the clients we have done this work for are wary of such a switch. For the most part this is simply a lack of knowledge. People generally don't understand databases well and see them as overly technical and expensive to generate and maintain.

This fear is unfounded. Much progress has been made in recent years in terms of ease of devlopment, use and perhaps most of all; affordability.

Spreadsheets are a tried and true method for some core systems and business processes. However, if you feel as if you can relate to some of the above items, it may be worthwhile taking the first step and take our free feasability study to assess your spreadsheet's suitability for conversion into a database.