How to Tell If Your Business Has Outgrown Excel
For the most part, every business uses Excel in some manner. It’s the world’s “most popular productivity tool.” You probably use it to organize your ideas, track information, tally receipts, manage contacts, calculate revenue, or for a million other reasons.
Surprisingly, many businesses are using Microsoft Excel as their primary data storage and analysis tool after they’ve outgrown it. They work with files that are years old. They’re unaware that their current process is actually costing them productivity. Excel works at a basic level when the company’s needs are few and light. Eventually, however, the business’ data requirements overtake Excel’s abilities. At this point, Excel stops being a tool and starts becoming an obstacle that holds the business back. Here are some signs that you’ve outgrown Excel.
You’re constantly reconciling spreadsheets
Image: ablebits.com Have you ever looked through a spreadsheet and felt the data wasn’t right? “Where are October’s revenue numbers?” you ask. Or maybe, “I swear Jenny inputted those sales figures.” Often this happens because you’re looking at the wrong version of the spreadsheet. Version control is the manner in which changes to software, websites, and collections of information are managed. Excel lacks any type of version control feature. If you sent a file to three people, and each person adds their own data, you now have four different versions. To put everything together, you have to manually copy and paste their data into a single file. This isn’t a big deal if you’re only working with a few rows and columns, but it can become a tremendous hassle when you have large data sets and formulas. Furthermore, each time you’re forced to reconcile Excel files is an opportunity to make a mistake. You should be using an application with a relational database that allows multiple users to interact with the data.
You waste time waiting for Excel to load
The most current version of Excel allows you to store up to a million rows of information. For most businesses, that’s more than enough, but that’s not where they reach a limit. Typical office computers start to lag when they access an Excel file of 100,000 rows. If your computer isn’t modern, it will take 5-10 minutes to open a file that size. Over time, those delays add up. If you’re working with large groups of information, a spreadsheet isn’t sufficient. You need a proper database with an interface or dashboard to interact with it.
You need stronger calculations
Yes, Excel is a beefy calculator. Experienced users can create impressive formulas, but most businesses don’t have someone on staff with years of experience writing Excel functions. If you find yourself regularly using the heavy-hitting functions like VLOOKUP, PIVOT, and SUMIF, you’ve reached the peak of Excel’s ability. Furthermore, Excel is not an analytical tool. It can’t evaluate historical data or make predictions about the future.
You have security needs
Depending on your type of business and size, you may have information that shouldn’t be shared with outsiders. An Excel file is easily transported and hard to track. If you have any information that should stay private, you need a new solution.
You’re analyzing two or more types of data
Excel is designed to track a single type of data. The proper way to track different data sets with Excel is to use multiple tabs or files, but this hinders your ability to quickly and effortlessly analyze them together. If you really want to drill down and look at the details of your business, you need a custom solution.
Your work can be automated
There’s no reason to do work that can be done for you by software. The failure of Excel here is that it doesn’t integrate with other solutions. Not only is this time-consuming, but your employees hate it. You need an application that integrates with other solutions, files, and programs so you and your people can spend their energy being creative and growing the business.
Going forward
It’s important to regularly evaluate your tools, no matter how embedded they are in your business process or industry. Excel is a fantastic tool and it’s going to be a part of many businesses for a long time, but don’t stick to a solution because it’s standard. Instead of a massive spreadsheet operation, you need an integrated system that tracks the data that’s meaningful to you.