The spreadsheet that runs your business
Every business we look at has one. It works, right up until it does not.
There is a spreadsheet. You know the one.
Colour coding that means something specific to one person. A tab called Sheet3 that nobody has opened since 2023 but nobody will delete. Three rows near the bottom that break the formula if you sort it wrong, so nobody sorts it.
And it runs the business. Jobs, or stock, or the roster, or who owes what.
Before anything else: that spreadsheet is not a failure. It is the reason the business works. Somebody sat down and solved a real problem with the tool they had, and it held for years. Good instinct, not an embarrassment.
But there is a point where it stops carrying the business and the business starts carrying it.
How you know you are past that point
One person understands it. If they are on leave, things wait. That is the big one, and most people already know it and would rather not think about it.
It breaks quietly. A formula stops copying down, nobody notices for two weeks, and there is no history to show when it went wrong.
There are two versions, because someone emailed a copy and worked on that instead.
And the one that actually hurts: you have stopped asking for information you would like to have, because getting it out is too painful to bother.
When to leave it alone
Often the answer is to leave it alone.
If it is holding, one or two people use it, and nothing about it wakes you up at night, it is fine. Replacing a working spreadsheet is a real cost and a real disruption, and it is not automatically an upgrade. We have told people to keep theirs.
The test is not whether it is messy. It is whether it is fragile in a way that would actually hurt, and whether it is eating hours you would rather have back.
What replacing it usually looks like
Smaller than people expect.
Not a system that does everything the business does. Just the one part that is fragile or slow, moved somewhere it can be shared safely, with a record of what changed and the weekly manual step done for you.
Usually the spreadsheet stays for everything else. You are not throwing out years of work, you are lifting out the bit that has outgrown it.
So the question is not whether to get software. It is which single job in here costs you the most time or the most risk. Answer that and the rest gets easier to decide.
If there is a spreadsheet you would be nervous to lose, that is worth a conversation. And if the website is the more pressing thing, our free check is the quicker place to start.
Give it a burl.