When the spreadsheet outgrows the company

How you know it is time

Two people need the file at once and one of them has to wait, or you e-mail each other copies named "final_2".

You wrote the formulas yourself and the company slows down when you are on holiday.

A customer asks where their job stands and you have to call someone and look in the file.

Every so often somebody types over a formula cell and nobody knows when it happened.

The first step is not writing code

The first step is taking the spreadsheet apart. On a scaffolding parts list, before a single line of code, I found ten mistakes in the client spreadsheet. For years he had been sending quotes based on it that were quietly wrong.

That is why the calculations are always tested against the original numbers. When a result differs, there has to be a reason, and the new app is not always the one that got it wrong.

What carries over and what does not

The structure and the data carry over: items, prices, customers, history. So do the calculations, rewritten so they cannot be typed over by accident.

Manual row colouring and cell comments do not. Whatever you were marking with a colour usually becomes a job status or a label, and that is something you can filter by.

What the company gets

Access for the whole team at once, each with their own login and their own view.

Work from a phone, in the workshop or at the customer, instead of in the evening at a desk.

A document in one click. The quote and the invoice come out of the same data; on Kotle CRM the invoice carries a SEPA payment QR code.

History. You can see who changed what and when, which an unversioned file will never tell you.

When to leave it alone

When one person works in the file, it works for them and nobody else needs it. Then Excel is the right tool and a system would just be a more expensive spreadsheet.

When nobody ever named the process. An app only makes that faster. The agreement on how it should work comes first.