Are Spreadsheets Killing Your Business?
Succeeding in Business means evaluating your existing processes for improvement. All businesses use spreadsheets for many tasks mainly because it’s quick and easy and doesn’t involve a complicated Information Technology cycle to deploy. How many tasks do you recognize in your own business?
- Travel Expenses
- Invoices
- Project Tracking
- Orders and Quotes
- Sales Prospects
- Workflow Checklists
- Vendor Management
The issues with spreadsheets manifest almost immediately and typically when there are more than three employees.
- Who has the current spreadsheet when multiple copies are sent via e-mail and stored in various places on the file server?
- Only one person can update at a time and often changes are overwritten when multiple employees are working on the same sheet.
- There’s no auditing and no way to tell who made what change.
The proliferation of spreadsheets is often a symptom of a business that needs to establish procedures and implement systems that can enforce the desired work flow.
If you recognize these issues in your business, what can you do to improve your efficiency?
The simple answer is that you need to assess your business processes and implement the appropriate technology to change those processes. The practical answer is that life and business is not that simple. Almost every business process change is resisted by employees who are comfortable with the legacy methods of running the business with spreadsheets. Perhaps they invented those clever sheets and feel some separation anxiety?
And that’s where spreadsheets are killing your business. You can’t move forward chained to a legacy method that doesn’t scale as your business grows.
Here’s a quick list of solutions that can help with some of your needs:
- Timesheet and Expense Management
- Automate Time and Expense Approvals with Electronic Submission
- Reporting for Billing and Invoicing
- Ability to Assign Time to Projects and Tasks
- Web based to support a Mobile and Distributed Workforce
- Ability to Assign Users to Approvers and Delegate Approvers
- Full Expense Management including Travel, Mileage, and Employee Reimbursements
- Order Management System
- Customer Service Management
- Customer Relationship Management
Kill the management by spreadsheet before it kills your business.
