Spreadsheets are fine until they are not: knowing when to move

Software vendors are rude about spreadsheets. They should not be. Excel is flexible, universally understood, costs nothing extra, and has run more successful businesses than any ERP.

The question is not whether spreadsheets work. It is whether they still work at the size you have become.

The signals that matter

Two people, two answers. When the same question produces different numbers depending on who you ask, you have lost single-source-of-truth. This is the clearest signal and it usually appears first.

A file called final_v3_updated_new. Version confusion means the version in use is now a matter of opinion.

One person who understands the model. When their absence stops the business answering basic questions, that is a serious operational risk wearing the costume of a helpful colleague.

Reconstruction instead of retrieval. If answering "what did we agree with this customer in March" means rebuilding rather than looking up, history is not being kept.

Reconciliation as a monthly project. Days spent making two systems agree is time paid for the absence of one system.

The signals that do not matter

• Number of rows. Excel handles far more than most property businesses generate.
• What a competitor bought. Their structure is not yours.
• A vendor's opinion, including ours.

The awkward truth about timing

Most businesses move about a year later than ideal, and the delay is rational: things are working, the change is disruptive, and there is always something more urgent.

The cost of waiting is not dramatic. It is a slow tax — hours spent reconciling, questions answered slowly, decisions made on figures a fortnight old. None of it is a crisis, which is exactly why it persists.

If you are not ready

Then do not move. But make the spreadsheet less fragile in the meantime:

• One master file, one owner, everyone else reads a copy
• Dated backups you have actually tested restoring
• A second person who understands the model
• Written definitions of what each column means

That costs a day and buys you a safer year in which to decide properly, rather than being forced into a hurried purchase by a failure.