Let's be clear from the start: we're not here to take your spreadsheet away. The spreadsheet is one of the best tools ever made. It's flexible, it's yours, everyone can open one, and you can have an idea at nine and a working sum by five past. Half the businesses in Manchester would stop on Monday without one.
The first spreadsheet program came out in 1979. It's still here, and it'll still be here in 2050. That's how the future usually works: it doesn't replace the old things, it grows up around them. A converted mill with fast broadband. A 1979 idea with new tools woven round it.
So the trouble isn't the spreadsheet. It's what happens to it over a few years.
How a spreadsheet becomes the system
It starts as a quick list. Then someone adds a column. Then a tab for each month. Then a formula that pulls from the other tab. Then somebody copies in figures from twenty-five PDFs every Friday, because that's where the numbers end up. Then it's emailed round as figures_FINAL_v2.xlsx, and there are three versions, and nobody's sure which is right.
Nobody decided to run the business on it. It just happened. Here are the signs it has:
- One person understands it. When they're off, nobody dares touch it.
- There are versions. "Final", "final 2", "use this one".
- Someone types things in that already exist somewhere else: from PDFs, emails, the till, the bank.
- There's a formula nobody wants to look at, because it works, probably.
- It's the only place the truth lives. Lose the file, lose the business's memory.
If two or three of those sound familiar, you're not doing anything wrong. You're doing what nearly every business does. But it's worth knowing what that costs.
Small slips, big bills
Spreadsheet mistakes are rarely dramatic. A row missed, a number typed twice, a date that turns into something else. Studies of real business spreadsheets keep finding errors in most of the ones they check. Usually it costs an afternoon. Sometimes it costs a great deal more. These all really happened:
In 2020, a national health body lost nearly sixteen thousand positive test results during the pandemic. The data went through an old spreadsheet format that ran out of rows, and the extra results simply fell off the end.
Widely reported, October 2020.Scientists renamed a couple of dozen human genes because spreadsheet software kept turning their names into dates. It was easier to change the science than the software.
Announced by the international gene-naming committee, 2020.A major bank's internal review of a multi-billion-dollar trading loss found its risk model had relied on spreadsheets where figures were copied and pasted by hand, with errors along the way.
From the bank's own published task-force report, 2013.An influential economics paper, quoted in arguments about government spending, turned out to have a spreadsheet formula that left several countries out of an average.
Found by a graduate student re-checking the data, 2013.Your business isn't a national health body or a global bank. But the same thing happens at your size: the invoice that didn't get chased because it fell off the list, the job that got quoted on last year's prices, the stock count that was "approx".
Keep the spreadsheet. Lose the grind.
Here's what we actually do, and it's less dramatic than you'd think:
- Keep the spreadsheet as the window. If your team likes looking at a sheet, they keep looking at a sheet.
- Take away the copying. Figures that already exist in a PDF, an email or the bank get pulled in by themselves. Nobody types them twice.
- One version of the truth. No more "final 2". Everyone sees the same numbers.
- Checks that catch the mess. The odd date, the duplicate, the "approx 400" get flagged the moment they appear, not at year end.
- One clear answer. Not more tabs: the one number you'd want on a postcard every Monday.
The future never looks like the future. It looks like your spreadsheet, without the Friday afternoon copying.
If you'd like to see what that looks like, the Check it out page has a few made-up messes you can spin in your browser.