When a Spreadsheet Stops Being Enough
Most internal software projects begin as a spreadsheet that outgrew itself. Knowing when that has happened saves a great deal of money.
Spreadsheets are excellent software. They are flexible, immediate, and require no procurement process. A great many businesses run genuinely important operations on one, and for a long time that is the correct decision.
The signals that it has stopped working
- More than one person needs to edit it at the same time, and someone keeps a personal copy
- There is a documented procedure for using it correctly
- Nobody can reconstruct who changed a figure, or when, or why
- Its contents are re-keyed into another system on a schedule
- A single mistyped cell can cause a customer-facing error
Two of these is normal. Four of these means the spreadsheet has become a database with no constraints, no audit trail and no access control — and the business is carrying that risk without having decided to.
What to do about it
Not necessarily build custom software. Sometimes the right answer is an off-the-shelf product that covers ninety per cent of the process, or a database tool with proper permissions. Custom software earns its cost when the process is genuinely specific to how your business competes — when the way you do this thing is part of why customers choose you.
Build custom software for the process that differentiates you. Buy everything else.
The mistake worth avoiding is rebuilding the spreadsheet exactly as it is, in a browser. If a process is being replaced, that is the moment to fix the parts of it that only exist because a spreadsheet could not do better.
The Cherbix Team
Engineering & editorial
Written and reviewed by the Cherbix engineers who do this work day to day — the same people who build the software, run the migrations and wire up the automation described here.