Spreadsheet or app: when a business outgrows Excel

Excel and Google Sheets are great to start with: they are fast, everyone knows them and they cost almost nothing. The trouble starts when a spreadsheet becomes the system the whole company runs on. Then the same flexibility that helped starts causing mistakes, duplicate work and dependence on the one person who “knows how the sheet works”.

Six signs you have outgrown spreadsheets

1. Several people edit the same sheet and someone regularly overwrites someone else’s data.
2. There are several versions of the same file, like “quotes_final_v3”, and nobody is sure which is right.
3. Only one person understands the formulas. When they are on holiday, work stops.
4. You enter the same data in several places: the sheet, the invoicing tool and email.
5. There is no history: you do not know who changed a price or status, or when.
6. The owner’s report is built by hand, every week, from several sheets.

What you get by moving to an app

• Each piece of data is entered once and shows up wherever it is needed.
• User roles: who can see and change what.
• A change history and clear statuses.
• Reports that update themselves.
• Work from a phone, without emailing spreadsheets around.

How to switch without shocking the team

The best custom apps look familiar to people who worked in spreadsheets: the same columns, the same names, the same order of steps, just without the mistakes and retyping. We migrate your existing data from Excel, so nobody starts from scratch. Before the build we make a prototype on your real data, so the team can try it before anything changes.

When to stay with Excel

If one or two people use the sheet, the data is not retyped elsewhere and there are no mistakes, Excel is perfectly fine. An app makes sense when the spreadsheet becomes the central place of work for the whole team.

Next step

Tell us about the spreadsheet that causes the most trouble. In a free diagnostic we work out together whether switching pays off, and we build a working prototype for €1,000, which is credited to the build. See prices and timelines on our custom software page.