Running a services business through spreadsheets and email may work when projects, teams, and client requirements are relatively simple. But as your business grows, so does the number of details that you need to balance: files multiply, important updates become buried in inboxes, and teams spend more time manually transferring and reconciling information across sales, staffing, delivery, and finance.
Spreadsheets, both physical and digital, have long been an integral part of business processes. Programs like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are used by companies across every industry around the world for resource management, project management, accounting, and much, much more.
And while email can feel like an efficient way to communicate updates, share files, and grant approvals, it’s easy for information and action items to get lost in an ever-growing inbox.
Businesses now rely so heavily on spreadsheets and email, that they may be creating more chaos and less cohesion in their operations…when they could be using purpose-built solutions that can perform certain functions much better.
You may already be seeing the warning signs. Here are ten indications that your business has a spreadsheet problem:
10 Signs Your Business Has a Spreadsheet Problem
1. Frequent Breaking
Spreadsheets are dependent on people entering the correct equations, which leaves businesses vulnerable to human error. As these spreadsheets become more complex through long-term use, it can be easy for their equations and data to break as a result of simple mistakes. This can lead to invalid data and time spent trying to pinpoint and fix the error.
2. Conflicting Versions
Using spreadsheets for business processes often leads to version control challenges. When the business doesn’t keep track of and determine which version should be used for all data entry, multiple conflicting versions with different data sets can be created. The confusion can cause serious issues when these conflicting versions are used for business decisions.
3. Spreadsheet Lockout
Some spreadsheet programs only allow one user to edit at a time. While this is designed to prevent conflicting simultaneous edits, it can eat into a large portion of your resources’ time as they wait for access to the information they need for work. This becomes even more common when the same document is used by a large group of people.
4. Massive File Size
Autosaves and updates can quickly balloon the file size of a spreadsheet, especially those that are commonly used and edited. Keeping old versions on file can help in the event of errors and the need for backups, but this will rapidly expand file sizes. A large volume of spreadsheets means that a company’s network can be strained and slowed down by a backlog of documents.
5. Data Validation Issues
Data entry can easily result in spreadsheet errors and requires consistent validation to prevent inaccurate insights that can go undetected for long periods of time. However, simple mistakes, like transposing numbers accidentally or using different naming conventions for the same subject, can go unnoticed and quickly cause errors and incomplete data.
6. Lost Time Spent in Navigation
It can become extremely difficult to find the exact data that you need in a spreadsheet when it has grown to hundreds of rows, multiple tabs, and additional linked spreadsheets have been created to handle the information being tracked. Spreadsheet search functions are often very simplistic, leading to users manually scrubbing through pages of data to find what they are looking for, leading to lost time that can quickly add up.
7. Security Concerns
Encryption for both offline and online spreadsheets may not be strong enough for the sensitive company information contained within them. In addition, employees may not enable the potential security measures that are available, leaving data vulnerable. This complication leads to our next issue.
8. Regulatory Compliance Issues
Countries around the world are holding businesses accountable for the safety of the massive amounts of data they hold, with regulations such as the EU Data Protection Directive and the Dodd-Frank Act creating a higher standard that many spreadsheets do not reach. If steps are not taken to protect spreadsheet data, companies can be held liable for any breaches that occur.
9. Slowdown in Decision Making
Consolidating and extracting data from spreadsheets, especially when this information must be compiled from different departments, can be time consuming. This can take even more time when a company is experiencing data integrity issues and must thoroughly validate the information. As a result, critical business decisions can be delayed as management waits for spreadsheet data to be finalized for their review.
10. Issues with Scaling
A growing business creates more data spread out across more team members and larger departments. This scaling creates greater pressure on spreadsheets and can compound the previous nine spreadsheet problems until they begin happening more frequently and across more areas of the business.
Why Running a Services Business on Spreadsheets and Email Does Not Scale
Running a professional services business through spreadsheets and email creates fragmented communication, repetitive administrative work, conflicting data, and limited visibility across projects, resources, and financial performance. Although this approach may work for a small team, it becomes increasingly unreliable as project volume, client complexity, and the number of people involved grow.
This can create a variety of challenges that impact your day-to-day operations, including:
- Scattered project and client information: Decisions, approvals, project updates, and scope changes become distributed across inboxes, attachments, and separate spreadsheets.
- Missed follow-ups and handoffs: Actions between sales, staffing, delivery, and finance depend on individuals forwarding messages or manually updating files.
- Repeated data entry: Client, project, budget, staffing, and billing details must be recreated across multiple documents and systems.
- Conflicting operational information: Teams may work from different versions of project schedules, staffing plans, budgets, or forecasts.
- Limited real-time visibility: Leaders struggle to see current project progress, capacity, utilization, delivery risk, revenue, and profitability.
- Manual reporting and reconciliation: Teams spend substantial time consolidating files and validating figures before reports can be trusted.
- Security and access concerns: Sensitive client, employee, project, and financial information may be shared without consistent permissions or audit trails.
How Kantata Helps Services Firms Move Beyond Spreadsheets and Email
Spreadsheets and email chains can only take a services firm so far. Once resourcing, delivery, and financials live in disconnected files and inboxes, leaders are left piecing together a puzzle that’s already out of date by the time they see it.
Kantata connects the pieces to complete the picture. Instead of pulling numbers from five spreadsheets and a dozen email threads, everyone across the team works from the same live data on projects, people, and performance.
This connected visibility changes how services firms operate day to day:
- Resource and capacity planning: See who’s available, who’s overbooked, and who has the right skills for upcoming work, without a separate headcount spreadsheet to maintain.
- Utilization visibility: Track billable and non-billable time across the business in real time instead of waiting on a month-end rollup.
- Project delivery control: Spot scope creep, budget overruns, and timeline risk while there’s still time to act, not after the invoice goes out.
- Revenue forecasting: Build forecasts from actual project and resourcing data instead of estimates copied between tabs.
- Profitability decisions: Understand margin at the project, client, and portfolio level so leaders can make informed calls about where to invest.
For a firm running one project, spreadsheets and email might hold up. Running dozens of projects across multiple clients at once is a different problem, and it calls for a system built to handle that complexity. Kantata gives services firms the clarity and control to manage that complexity with confidence.
See how Kantata’s professional services automation platform gives your firm the clarity and control to plan smarter and deliver with confidence.