Spreadsheet or dashboard: when is it worth switching?
Short answer: As long as one person works in one sheet, a spreadsheet is plenty. It stops being enough when several people edit it at once, when a mistake costs money, or when you need the information on your phone, away from the office. From then on, a dashboard built around your business saves you time and mistakes.
The spreadsheet is not the problem
Nearly every business starts in a spreadsheet, and rightly so. Everyone knows how to use one and it adapts to anything. Do not change for the sake of it.
Five signs it is no longer enough
- There is more than one version of the file and nobody knows which is right.
- There has been a double booking, or one car promised to two customers.
- Only one person understands the sheet, and everything slows down when they are on holiday.
- To find out what came in last month, someone spends an afternoon adding up.
- The team out on the road rings the office to ask what the sheet says.
What changes with a dashboard
A management dashboard is the same information, but in one place, the same for everyone and up to date at once. The person at the desk, the person on the road and the owner all see the same thing, each on their own screen and only what they need. A booking that comes in through the website appears by itself, with nobody copying it across.
What should not change is the way you work. A good dashboard is designed around your day, in your words and your steps, and it brings in the data you already have in the sheet.
What about ready-made software?
It exists, and for many businesses it does the job. Try it first: if a ready-made program does what you need, it is the simplest choice. A custom dashboard makes sense when your business has rules those programs do not know, or when you end up using three programs that do not talk to each other.
What to do this week
- Count how many people edit the sheet and how many versions exist.
- Note last month's mistakes that came from out-of-date information.
- Write down the five things you look up every day. That is where a dashboard starts.
Written by The W2 Collective team, in Santa Cruz, Madeira.
