Spreadsheets are load-bearing more often than admitted
Plenty of profitable businesses run their core process in a shared workbook. It is flexible, everyone understands it, and it has grown organically into something critical.
There is no point pretending otherwise. The question is what to automate around it.
What works well
- Automating the input — extracting from emails and documents into new rows
- Validation — flagging rows that break your own rules
- Summarising — turning the sheet into a written weekly position
- Answering questions about the data without anyone opening it
Automating input into the spreadsheet delivers most of the benefit and requires nobody to change how they work. It is almost always the right first move.
What does not
- Anything requiring reliable concurrent writes
- Anything needing a real audit trail
- Anything where a broken formula would be catastrophic
- Row-level permissions, which spreadsheets do not really have
Cloud spreadsheets integrate much better
Google Sheets and Excel on Microsoft 365 have proper APIs. A workbook on a shared drive does not, and integrating with it means file watching, locking problems and eventual corruption.
Moving to a cloud spreadsheet is often the cheapest useful step and it changes nothing about how the team works.
Know when it is time to move
| Signal | What it means |
|---|---|
| Multiple people editing simultaneously | You need a database |
| Versions with different totals | You need one source of truth |
| Formulas nobody understands | You have accumulated real risk |
| Over about 20,000 rows | Performance and errors will increase |
| Anyone can see everything | You have a permission problem |
Two or more of those, and a proper system is worth pricing. Fewer, and the spreadsheet is doing its job.