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Iterna

Spreadsheets are running your business

At some point a spreadsheet stops being something one person uses and becomes the thing the business depends on. That change usually happens without anyone noticing.

This usually looks like

  • Files named v3_final_updated(2)
  • One person who is the only one who understands the formulas
  • Two departments working from two versions of the same sheet
  • Numbers that don’t match and nobody’s sure which is right
  • A file that’s now too big to open comfortably

Why it happens

Spreadsheets are genuinely excellent — flexible, immediate, no permission required. That’s exactly why they spread.

The problem isn’t the spreadsheet. It’s that it quietly became the system of record without anyone deciding it should be.

Nobody chose to run the business on a file with no history, no permissions and no way to tell who changed what. It just happened one useful sheet at a time.

What we’d do about it

  1. 01

    Work out what the sheets actually do

    Which ones hold the real record, which are working copies, and which exist only because a system can’t produce a report.

  2. 02

    Separate what needs a system from what doesn’t

    Anything several people change, anything that needs history or permissions, and anything the business would struggle to reconstruct.

  3. 03

    Build the parts that need controls

    Records with an owner, changes with a history, access by role, and reporting that comes out of the system rather than being assembled by hand.

  4. 04

    Migrate the data

    Including the awkward rows. Real spreadsheets have blanks, duplicates and exceptions, and those have to be resolved rather than ignored.

Not everything needs to leave Excel. Sometimes the right answer is to keep the spreadsheet and build one system around the two things it can’t safely do.

What it costs to leave alone

The cost is rarely a dramatic failure. It’s the slow kind: a wrong number in a report nobody catches, an hour a day spent reconciling versions, a month-end that takes three days instead of one.

The sharper risk is concentration. When one person understands the formulas, their leave, their resignation or their laptop becomes a business problem.

And spreadsheets don’t tell you when they’re wrong. A formula that stopped covering the last twenty rows will keep producing a confident, incorrect total for as long as nobody checks.

Where to go next

Tell us what the spreadsheets are doing.

How many there are, who edits them and what breaks when two people open the same one. That’s enough to tell you what should become a system.

Tell us your problem