There are four versions of the same file
"Tracking_2026_FINAL_v3_Marc.xlsx". Everyone works on their copy, merging is manual, and nobody knows which one governs this morning.
By situation
The spreadsheet works. That's exactly the problem: nobody dares touch it any more.
A spreadsheet stops being the right tool the day several people must write to it at once, a typo no longer shows, or only one person still understands the formulas. As long as those three conditions are absent, replacing Excel costs money and fixes nothing — and that's the advice we give most often.
What brought you here
Only one person understands the formulas
They've been there twelve years, they built the file, and the day they're on holiday at the wrong moment, the business stops. That isn't an IT risk, it's a business risk.
Mistakes no longer show
A cell overwritten by accident triggers nothing. You notice a month later, in a number that doesn't add up — and by then there's no way to know when, or by whom.
What we actually do
We start from your file, not from a template
The spreadsheet holds years of business rules nobody ever wrote down elsewhere. It's the best specification in your company, and it's already paid for.
The rules become guardrails
What was a convention followed out of habit becomes a system constraint: a required field, an impossible value refused, a duplicate flagged at entry.
History is carried over, not reset
Existing data is migrated with its inconsistencies visible rather than silently cleaned. You see what was wrong before deciding what to do about it.
Exporting back to Excel stays possible
Your accountant, insurer and banker work in spreadsheets. An application that prevents producing one gets worked around within the month.
When this isn't for you
This isn't for you if the file is used by one person and it works: in that case Excel is the right tool and replacing it would be spending for nothing. It isn't for you either if the real problem is that nobody fills the file in — software doesn't create a discipline that doesn't exist, it only makes one easier to keep.
No sales page writes this section. That's precisely why it's here: it saves you a thirty-minute call, and saves us an engagement we'd decline anyway.
Questions we get on this
Do we lose Excel's flexibility?
Partly, and that's the point. A spreadsheet's flexibility is exactly what lets someone overwrite a formula by mistake. What must stay flexible — analysis, exports, views — does; what must be reliable stops being flexible.
What about the VBA macros we had built?
They're read as a specification: what they do is what the system will have to do. They aren't ported as is — a macro often reproduces an Excel constraint rather than a rule of your business.
Neighbouring situations
Fifteen minutes to find out whether we can be useful.
You leave with what we saw, in writing, even if we never work together.