Spreadsheets carry more of the economy than anyone admits. They are fast, flexible, and understood by everyone. They also have a point past which they cost more than they save.
A spreadsheet is a single-writer tool wearing a multi-user costume. The moment two people need to change it in the same hour, you get versions, and versions are how the wrong number reaches a board pack.
The tell is a filename with a date or a set of initials in it. Once that starts, the sheet has already become a distribution problem rather than a calculation.
Watch for a sheet where the columns encode a workflow: a status column, an owner column, a date-chased column. That sheet is not a calculation any more. It is a case management system with no permissions, no audit trail and no validation.
This is the most common point at which a business is quietly running something critical on a tool that cannot tell you who changed what.
When the person who built it has left, and the remaining answer to how a figure is derived is that the sheet has always done it that way, the calculation has become folklore.
The risk here is not that it is wrong. The risk is that nobody can tell whether it is wrong, which means an error can persist for years and then surface during due diligence.
Volume limits arrive suddenly. A sheet that opened in two seconds last year takes forty this year, and a recalculation locks the machine. At that point people start keeping partial copies to work in, which returns you to the versions problem with extra steps.
Not everything needs replacing. A sheet used by one analyst to model something occasional is a good tool doing a good job, and moving it into a system removes the flexibility that made it useful.
Replace the ones where several people write, where a process is being tracked, or where a number leaves the building. Start with whichever of those carries the most risk, and move the process into something with permissions, validation and a record of changes. Keep the rest.
Checklist
No, and trying to is a common and expensive mistake. Sheets used by one person for occasional analysis are the right tool. The ones to replace are those several people write to, or that track a process, or that produce a figure somebody outside the business relies on.
It depends on which failure you have. A shared workflow usually wants a small internal tool with permissions and history. A reporting sheet usually wants a reporting layer over a proper data source. They are different fixes.
Less than people expect if it is done one process at a time, and considerably more if it is done as one large replacement. The sheet stays in use until the replacement demonstrably matches it.
Describe what is slowing the operation down. We will come back with the approach, the scope, and what it costs.
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