A system instead of a spreadsheet

Excel is an excellent tool and most businesses rightly grow on it. The problem comes when the business stops fitting inside it. The formulas are known to one person, the file circulates in three versions, nobody knows which is the latest, and when that one person is on holiday, the business slows down.

That is not Excel’s fault. It is just a sign the business has outgrown what it was made for.

The first step is not programming

Before I build anything, I go through your current process and take it apart piece by piece. This is the most important part of the whole project, and also the part most suppliers skip.

With a scaffolding client, before the first line of code, I wrote a list of thirty-eight questions and did not start designing the database until the answers came in. Along the way it turned out there were ten calculation mistakes in his Excel. For years he had been sending quotes that were quietly wrong.

Most badly built systems are not badly programmed. They are built on a poor understanding of what the business actually does.

What tends to be in such a system

Customers and their history. Jobs with their status and who is working on them. Stock with what is really there and what needs ordering. Quotes that calculate themselves from dimensions, invoices in one click and an overview of takings that tells you how much of it was left.

It is not all put in at once. The first version deals with what hurts most and goes out within a week, so you can try it before another month of work is poured into it.

How it works at Kotle CRM

A boiler servicing company ran its sales and invoicing through a single Excel. The first working version of the new system took three hours. Customers have cards with what the company actually needs to know about boilers. Which boiler, which flue, which contract, when it was last serviced. Sales cases move between columns by dragging with the mouse, so at a glance you see where something got stuck.