When do spreadsheets and everyday tools stop being enough?

Excel, e-mail, shared documents or ordinary applications can serve a company for years. They are available, people know them, and for many situations they are perfectly sufficient.

The problem usually does not arise because one of these tools stops working. It arises because the company around it changes.

More clients, people, projects or new services arrive. One spreadsheet is no longer enough, so another one appears. Part of the information stays in e-mail, part in the CRM, some on a shared drive, and a few important connections are known only to particular people.

Each tool may work perfectly well on its own. What becomes harder is the work between them.

The signal is not the number of spreadsheets

There is no threshold beyond which a company needs its own system. Ten spreadsheets may work without trouble, and two may cause unnecessary work every day.

It matters more to watch what the current arrangement forces people to do.

A typical signal is when the same detail is entered in several places, when the current state of a project has to be traced through several people, or when a regular report is assembled by hand from different sources every time.

It is equally worth paying attention when every change in the company produces another spreadsheet, another helper application, or another procedure that somebody has to keep in their head.

The mere existence of these solutions is not yet a problem. The problem begins when running them starts to take a disproportionate amount of time or increases the risk that people are working with out-of-date information.

It makes sense to look for a simpler solution first

Custom software is not the automatic answer.

Sometimes it is enough to adjust the current procedure. In other cases, to configure a tool the company already uses properly, or to replace several applications with one standard product.

Custom development starts to make more sense where the problem does not arise inside one tool, but in the handover between several parts of the company.

Sales, for example, creates an order, which is followed by a contract, invoicing, the work of particular people and the reporting that follows. If information is passed between the individual steps by hand every time, this is no longer a question of a better spreadsheet.

A system should follow the way the company works

Before anything is developed, the current way of working has to be understood. Which parts work well, where unnecessary work arises, which data belongs together, and what is worth changing at all.

Only then can you decide whether it is better to adjust the current tools, deploy standard software, connect several existing solutions or build a custom system.

That is why at Cabakorp we start with an analysis. Its purpose is not to justify development at any price, but to find out what is worth solving and how.