Every growing business has one. It lives on somebody's laptop. It has seventeen tabs, a few cells highlighted in yellow that nobody dares touch, and a name like "FINAL stock v3 (use this one)".
It runs the company. And only one person really understands it.
We have nothing against spreadsheets. They are the best tool there is for working something out quickly. A business that starts on a spreadsheet is being sensible. The trouble starts when the business outgrows it and nobody notices.
Five signs you have outgrown it
- The file is emailed around, and people argue about which copy is the latest.
- The same figure is typed in more than once: into the receipt book, then the sheet, then the accountant's sheet.
- When the person who built it is on leave, certain questions simply wait for them.
- You find out about a stock-out or an unpaid invoice from a customer, not from your records.
- Month end takes days, most of it spent checking one list against another.
One of these is an annoyance. Three of them together are costing you money, even if it does not appear on any report. In fact it does not appear precisely because the reports are the problem.
What a system does differently
A spreadsheet stores what someone remembered to type. A system records things as they happen.
When a sale is made, stock goes down. When an M-Pesa payment arrives, it lands on the right customer's account. When a delivery comes in, what you owe the supplier goes up. Nobody copies anything, so there is nothing to forget and nothing to reconcile later.
It also remembers who did what. That is not about mistrust. It is what lets you hand work to more people as you grow, without the owner checking every entry.
You do not have to change everything at once
The fear we hear most is that moving to a system means stopping the business for a month. It should not.
Start with the part that hurts most. For a shop that is usually stock and sales. For a school it is fees. For a landlord it is rent collection. Move that one thing, bring the existing records across, let the team get comfortable, then take the next.
A good system should also be shaped around how you already work. If your business has to bend to fit the software, you have swapped one problem for another.
What it costs to stay
It is easy to see the cost of a new system, because someone sends you a quote. The cost of staying on the spreadsheet never arrives as an invoice, so it is easy to ignore.
- Hours. Count the time your team spends each week entering the same figures twice and checking one list against another.
- Mistakes. A wrong formula or a row sorted out of place can go unnoticed for months.
- Slow decisions. If it takes days to learn how last month went, you are always steering by old information.
- Risk. A single file on a single laptop is one spilled cup of tea away from being gone.
- Dependence. When only one person understands the sheet, the business cannot grow past what that person can handle.
There is a newer cost as well. Businesses in Kenya are now expected to issue electronic tax invoices, which is hard to do from a spreadsheet and easy from a system that records each sale as it happens. We covered that in eTIMS Is Here for Every Business.
Where to go from here
If you are not sure what would replace your spreadsheet, start with our plain guide, What Is an ERP System? It explains the idea without the jargon. And if you would like to see what a system looks like for your kind of business, have a look at the ones we build.
The goal is not to get rid of the spreadsheet. It is to stop the business depending on one.
Keep the spreadsheet for what it is good at: thinking, planning, trying out ideas. Let the daily running of the company live somewhere it cannot be accidentally sorted by the wrong column.
