Spreadsheets have been there for decades, helping businesses and individuals manage their data. However, using a spreadsheet has become recently an uncompetitive and time-wasting practice. Because it lacks many features more advanced solutions are offering.
If your competitors are using advanced automation tools, they can be offering better customer service. Having more accurate data among other benefits that put them far ahead of you.
If you are still wondering why excel would be such an outdated solution for advanced business tasks, we are sharing the top reasons behind this in this blog.
The reasons spreadsheets should be ditched
No real-time collaboration and data access
If you are using an offline version of Excel and still sharing excel files via mail whenever there is an edit. This could be one of the most time-wasting processes inside your business.
Offline spreadsheets, unlike cloud solutions like Google Sheets, do not allow more than one person to edit the same file. Thus, making everything take much longer. There is also no ability to see edits in real-time, which makes it much less efficient in daily work.
Having tons of files
Another reason that makes using spreadsheets inefficient is that managing your business data using them will likely require a large number of files.
This large number of files makes it hard for everyone to find specific information. Especially if you haven’t organized the files themselves. Whether the information is related to finance or any other department’s information. It will affect the processes of the department and the data accessibility, clarity, and integrity.
Less efficient follow-ups
Following up with team members using a spreadsheet means sending tens of daily emails just for sharing a little piece of information. Dedicated tools for project management on the other side facilitate communication and updates between teams, making project management more efficient.
More guesses and inaccuracy
When you don’t have access to real-time data, you will be likely to make more inaccurate decisions and guesses than your competitors. And if you can’t find information at all, you will likely make wrong decisions actively.
Automation solutions gather data in one place, giving you full visibility whenever you need to make a decision. Then, let your work become more efficient. You can also make use of the insights that you can only generate when data is managed and gathered in one place.
Automating your business processes
Automating business processes and ditching spreadsheets to save time, enhance visibility and decision making and take advantage of many more benefits is not hard.
Depending on your budget, you can either use separate tools for project management, document management, and so on. Or you can get a dedicated solution developed according to your needs.
