When has your spreadsheet grown too big?

Excel is a good tool. For a budget, a price list, a calculation you make once or an overview for yourself, you need no other software. If your file does its job, it can stay where it is.

That changes when the file becomes a fixed part of your working week. I then look for two signs: you repeat the same steps, and you copy and paste a lot.

You repeat the same steps

This is work that comes back every day, every week or every month and takes some time on each occasion. Five minutes a day I would not count. Fifteen minutes or an hour I would.

A quarter of an hour sounds small because you only see it one day at a time. Take roughly 220 working days a year (the right number depends on your business). A quarter of an hour per working day then comes to 55 hours a year, about seven full working days. An hour per working day is 220 hours, more than five working weeks. Something that only comes back monthly counts as well: half a day a month is six working days a year.

Do the same sum for your own task: the time per occasion, times the number of occasions per year, times the number of people doing it. Count your own hours if you do it yourself. That number lets you compare later with what another solution would ask of you, such as having software built.

You copy and paste a lot

The second sign is manual work between two places. You paste data from one place to another, or you manually start something that always runs the same way.

Say that every Monday you export the orders from your webshop, paste them into Excel, sort them by supplier and then send each supplier an email. No single step is hard. They do follow the same rules every time, and software can usually take over that kind of work.

Anyone who pastes a lot will now and then paste into the wrong column or over a formula. In a big file you do not always see that straight away, and the more often the steps come back, the more chances there are for a slip like that.

A simple test is to write the steps down so that a colleague could follow them with no questions. If that works, software can probably follow them too. If you find yourself writing “and then I check whether it looks right”, that step holds a judgement. A step like that stays with a person, or AI makes a suggestion that a person checks.

The same signs without Excel

The signs also apply to work on paper, in emails or in an accounting package. I have two examples from my own work.

An accounting team closes the books every month. It looks for booking errors, reconciles accounts (it checks that the figures in the accounts match, for example, the bank) and books accruals. Those are costs or income that belong to a different month from the month of the invoice. Eagl, where I work in the team on a freelance contract, aims to do away with that manual close using AI agents, software that carries out tasks like these by itself.

WTN App was an app for waste transfer notes in the UK. Carriers used to assemble their quarterly returns by hand, and in the app that was an export. A task like that only comes back four times a year, so there you mainly count the time per occasion. I have since stopped working on WTN App and it is no longer maintained.

What takes its place

That depends on the task. The same complaint, “this takes me too much time”, can have very different answers:

• It can stay in Excel, with a better setup or a macro. A macro is a small program inside the file that carries out steps for you.
• If the work is roughly the same in every business, like making invoices, a tool probably exists already. Custom software or an existing tool? helps you choose.
• If the data already sits in two systems and you retype it from one to the other, a connection between them may be enough.
• If several people work with the same data at once, under rules that only belong to your business, a web app can fit. That is software that runs in the browser and is built around how you work.

You only know which answer fits once it is clear how the work runs now. That is why I first ask how you do it today and why you want to walk away from that.

Your file helps with that conversation. A spreadsheet that has been around for years often holds exceptions and calculations that are written down nowhere else. Bring it along when you talk to someone about a replacement, and keep it until the replacement gives the same result.