The symptom
“The business runs on spreadsheets only one person understands”
Replace Spreadsheets and Manual Processes
What it’s costing you
The spreadsheet works until its author is away.
- Nobody is certain which copy of the spreadsheet is the current one
- A formula error travels into decisions before anyone notices it
- The person who built the sheet is the only person who can change it
Why it usually happens
Spreadsheets grow because they never say no.
- The spreadsheet began as a quick fix and worked, and nothing that works gets replaced while it is merely risky
- Each urgent week added a column, a tab or a rule, and no single week ever justified stopping to build it properly
- One person keeps it alive, which keeps the true cost invisible until the week they are away
The target operating state
The process moves into a system with rules.
- 01In the published costing engagement, estimation logic that lived in one head became a repeatable calculation, material rates, labour by trade, wastage and contingency, with stock deductions following what jobs actually consumed
- 02The spreadsheet’s real logic mapped first, because the sheet is usually the truest record of how the business works
- 03That logic rebuilt in a system with permissions, history and validation
- 04The spreadsheet retired only once the system answers every question the sheet answered
A worked example
The estimate left the spreadsheet.
Before
Pricing lived in the experience of one supervisor, stock reconciliation depended on manual counting, and a job could look healthy while its true cost was absorbed elsewhere.
After
An estimation framework holds the material rates, labour mapping, wastage and contingency, so the calculation is repeatable and consumption follows what the job used rather than what the invoice showed.
Services that may be involved
Platforms that suit this
Questions
Can we keep some of our spreadsheets?
Yes. Spreadsheets are good at analysis. What moves into a system is any record other people depend on: prices, stock, quotations, approvals. The sheet stops being the master copy.
What happens to the years of data in our sheets?
It migrates, against a cleansing standard and a deadline agreed in writing. Deduplication and structure are the real work, because a sheet has been forgiving of things a system will not forgive.
Where do we start?
With the sheet whose author cannot take leave. The published costing engagement began exactly there: one supervisor’s pricing, held in memory and paper, turned into a system the company can run without him.
How is a build like this priced?
Through a paid discovery that produces the specification, the screens, the data model and a fixed price. You own that specification and could take it elsewhere, which is precisely why the number can be trusted.
Retire the spreadsheet on your terms, not its own.
If that sentence sounded familiar, the Health Check maps it properly before anything is bought.