Top 10 Signs It's Time To Retire Your Spreadsheet

 Many small and medium sized businesses experience growing pains when their budgeting or forecasting software fails to grow at the same pace as their business. Whether it’s for finance, accounting, supply chain management, customer relationship management or sales – most businesses rely on spreadsheets in some way. Spreadsheets aren’t wrong or bad for your business, but when used improperly they can lead to a lot of negative aspects such as wasted effort, bottlenecks, incorrect decision-making and overall frustration and anxiety with each of these limitations.

Here’s a lighter look at the top 10 signs you’ve moved beyond the spreadsheet and need an upgrade:

1. Predicting financial outcomes for your investors and shareholders is more accurate when you use a Magic 8 ball than the answers you get from your MS Excel.
2. You pass around the same spreadsheet to so many people it turns into a game of Telephone, where the final result always ends up incomprehensible
3. It takes more time to close the month that you took for your last vacation.
4. Double-checking (or triple-checking) spreadsheets is showing up in job descriptions for new hires.
5. By the time you finish formatting your spreadsheet to print on a reasonable number of pages, the numbers you go into your meeting with are no longer current.
6. You spend more time cutting and pasting every day than your son does in pre-school.
7. You have a bruise on your forehead from opening the wrong version of a spreadsheet for the 10^th time today.
8. Thanks to the spreadsheet, uncovering hidden errors is taking longer than it did to unravel the Caramilk secret.
9. You’ve added so many tabs to your spreadsheet that it looks more like a Table of Contents for the latest eBook you are reading.
10. You know your spreadsheets have cost you more in lost employee productivity, delayed orders and customer workarounds than a new system would cost – but you can’t find an Excel formula to give you that data.