“Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the system itself.”
When starting out with a business its common for many businesses to track business performance and metrics using excel sheets. Organizations simply comply to use excel and other simple tools available at hand. Small businesses can run their processes using excel and other available tools for a time being but as the business expands working on excel becomes difficult leading to errors and bottlenecks. It does work however is not very effective and it is then that it threatens the integrity of the company.
Spreadsheets can manage your records and metric but only business solutions enable you to run your business effectively.
Excel is holding you from excelling
Listed down are some of the major points to help you know that using Spreadsheets might not be the Best idea for an SME.
Bit more Data, and it just gives up.
Excel makes it difficult to manage data from multiple sources. So if you have multiple branches or customer for multiple services. It will be very difficult for you to manage records and track process on excel. Further down the line, the efficiency of spreadsheets decreases as the size of a file increases. Though data can be extracted and removed from spreadsheets manually to decrease the size and efficiency of excel, doing these fragments your company data and hampers analysis.
Excel needs extra help
You can not use excel as the only source and store for your data, you would have to use many other tools and resources to read, monitor and analyze the data from excel. You end up spending more time to collect data than on analyzing and working on it and yes this just not makes the process very time consuming but very chaotic and difficult at the same time.
Makes your work error nous
It does not take much effort to copy paste once. If it has to be done a hundred times a day, it might be risky. You can’t risk loosing on your growth because of some copy paste error. Can You? It’s not very resourceful to copy quotation from a spreadsheet on a business system. Every time you receive an order, or make a change or get through one step of the process. That would just increase the chances of errors and would just incur extra cost for your business for the mistakes and delay caused.
Holds you back from sharing
The same information cannot be accessed by multiple people and real-time changes and updates cannot be made. Data sharing and validation in real time is not possible.
Duplicate Data Issue
You might have to put in hours drilling down on the issue of data duplication. If you use Excel for the purpose of data duplication and data analysis. Moving and emailing files would create duplicates which would again have to be tracked and handled. Duplicate files would lead to the creation of multiple versions making the user waste more time tracking down the original file.
Data on excel is never ever secure
Data security is a big question mark when using excel spreadsheets for recording business performance and data. The data on spreadsheets does not comply with the same level of controls and discipline as that of properly managed data on specific business software solutions.
A recent poll by the Information Security Forum (ISF), a user-based group made up of about 300 major corporations from around the world, found that many respondents identified user-developed applications, especially spreadsheets, among the top 10 most serious threats they face today.
You cannot obtain a complete view of the business process
Getting a full picture of the business process and data is not possible with excel spreadsheets. You can get data in segments through the many files that you crunch up in the tool. That means you make a chance to lose on chances. Spotting the big errors and issue is next to impossible as long as you don’t have the complete view.
We are not saying theres anything wrong with Excel — it is a great personal productivity tool. Infact, it is one the most used programs in the corporate treasury. However, it was not built to serve complex processes or support critical parts of the business key decisions. Excel is nothing more than an empty page waiting for numbers to be crunched.
We have such business software solutions that can do all the things that excel cant, and we invite you to come to check it out.
To learn more about why spreadsheets should not be used instead of business software by SMB’s and large companies, check out our pdf, “Why you cannot excel with Spreadsheets. ”
For more information about our enterprise business solutions contact us at [email protected] or fill out this form and let us know your query.
Use Excel to track business metrics? Let us know your experience with the tool.
