Sheets to Systems
Tired of spreadsheet chaos?
It’s time to upgrade from Excel.
Here’s the problem...
Spreadsheets were never designed to run a business. Yet, in practice, they often do - not because they’re ideal, but because they’re accessible and well-understood.
But as a business grows, this convenience becomes a trap. Spreadsheets begin to sprawl. Data gets overwritten. Versions become conflicted. Information gets lost. Errors creep in. What starts as something viable, eventually becomes time-consuming, unreliable and unscalable.
To complicate matters, many cloud platforms only reinforce this problem. There is an “app” for everything, but too often, these apps don’t talk to each other, creating “information islands”, for which the only method of translation is Excel.
Over-relying on spreadsheets creates deeper problems over time: poor processes, business errors, unhappy customers, and a lack of visibility across the business.
Why is this a problem?
Spreadsheet Overuse causes these key risks to a business:
1) Poor Data Quality. Typo’s, Copy-Paste errors, accidental deletions… or data just going into the wrong place! These errors snowball over time, until the quality of a dataset can no longer be relied upon.
2) No Workflows or Automation. Any spreadsheet-based process is inherently manual, laborious, and error-prone. This makes business slower, inefficient and more reactive.
3) Multi-User Access. Although Office 365 allows multi-user spreadsheet access, too many people using a spreadsheet at once leads to version conflicts, accidental overwrites, and broken formulas.
4) Scalability Limits. As datasets grow, spreadsheets slow down, crash, and become unreliable.
5) Security and Compliance Risks. Keeping Personally Identitfying Information (PII) is kept in an open and visible format, allowing for misuse and mishandling of sensitive customer data.
6) Poor Reporting & Decision Making. As spreadsheets grow, reporting becomes difficult, and sometimes incomplete or misleading, inhibiting the ability to make decisions based on good-quality, reliable information.
How Do We Help?
Samurai Tech will slash out your cumbersome manual processes, and replace them with a reliable, scalable system that is specifically suited to your business.
Because every business is unique, we begin with an assessment of your organisation, how it works, and what your key information requirements are.
Some clients benefit from pre-packaged, turnkey solutions. And for our clients who have complex requirements, we research products on the market, and evaluate them with you.
During implementation, our training and adoption methods ensure that your staff are not just trained on the new platform, but are brought on-board with why you are doing this and what benefits it will deliver to the workforce, ensuring your team adopts the new system with confidence, not confusion.
Want your time back?
Talk to us today to find out how we can do this for you too, and get you back to what you should be doing.
* Circular Quay penthouse not guaranteed ;-)