To Excel or Not to Excel
Why should you shun spreadsheets to scale your business?
Excel spreadsheets have been pretty useful as data formatting and calculating tools – but are they really good enough to manage all your business processes? Truthfully speaking, spreadsheets are now obsolete and can cause more loss than gain to businesses. Nevertheless, plenty of enterprises across the world use spreadsheets to manage their entire business workflow and lifecycle - from contact management, to time tracking, to reporting and everything in between. A major trap a lot of these businesses fall into is complacency.
Many organizations have grown so used to spreadsheets that they refuse to look beyond. If you don’t have a powerful enterprise workflow manager handling the show, using Google’s spreadsheets is not going to make much of a difference. Do you want your business to avoid this? Watch out for these five signs that it is high time for you to evolve past spreadsheets. Tabular can handle all your business workflow and increase your process efficiency, positively impacting productivity and profitability.
Multiple versions of data
With spreadsheets, there is a high probability for data or formula errors in at least one version of the data. And that’s the catch, with many users formatting multiple versions of the same data, it becomes quite difficult to maintain an empirical record. Moreover, with spreadsheets, you need to consolidate data every single time a new version of the file pops-up.
Storing a big file is also difficult, as for collaborative purposes it has to be stored on the cloud – Google spreadsheets or the Dropbox widget might help you with versioning, but it can’t do much else. This causes unnecessary frustration and forces employees to spend more time on non-productive and redundant jobs. Ironically, without employees spending time on this step, it might be almost impossible to find accurate data, when push comes to shove.
No real-time visibility
With isolated versions of spreadsheets, there is no way of bringing up an empirical file without halting all updates, it’s also next to impossible to have real-time visibility of business progress. Without this, a business would fail severely, if it were to stop all processes just to see if all the data adds up in place. This, in turn directly impacts the timely delivery of services or products, and the bottom line of your business. Due to this severe drawback, you can only draw monthly, quarterly, or end of year reports, and no real-time data is found after the progress of every odd job and process.
Lack of business insights
The only way you can run a successful business in a post-pandemic economy, is to make smart data-driven, informed, quick decisions, as and when the business landscape demands. Business leaders need to be on top of veritable data to make split-second decisions that could make or break an upcoming project. For such a feat, it is aggravating to have to compile data from multiple spreadsheets and present it in a way that makes perfect sense.
With a robust data management platform like Tabular, you will be able to wrangle the data easily, helping you create reports and present analytics that would be both real-time and veritable. Better reports and analytics mean better business decisions and therefore, better productivity, performance, and smoother workflows.
Low process consistency
With spreadsheets, you can customize and organize the sheets any way you want – there are literally endless ways to organize, format or display information. Although this sounds like a really good feature to have, it brings serious inconsistency in the spreadsheets. When all stakeholders are creating different versions; it is easy to miss the standardized format. In an ecosystem like this, it is easier for teams to end up with process inconsistency and complicated workflows. With Tabular in place, you can standardize processes to track time, tasks, costs and other data, organically increasing efficiency.
Space for improvement
For all of the above reasons, spreadsheets may not be the best way forward to achieve organizational efficiency or process improvement. While spreadsheets might have helped with basic operations, you would definitely need something more effective to set your big plans for business improvement in motion. A robust workflow management platform like Tabular offers an easy way to wrangle data from various business sources and helps to ultimately improve your business operations.
Conclusion
From products and services to buyers, suppliers, and even consumer preferences, many enterprises are inundated with large amounts of data from ever-diversifying sources. On the other side, consolidating and analyzing this data can unlock a treasure trove of business growth opportunities. Enterprises that shun the spreadsheet and invest in an effective enterprise data management solution are better placed to measure different aspects of their business, which in turn can help them make excellent data-informed tactical and strategic business decisions.
If you have identified more than one of the five pain points mentioned above, it’s time to ditch Excel for a more robust business process management and workflow automation solution. In merely a few clicks, Tabular transforms Excel spreadsheets, project documents, expense reports, time sheets, inventory sheets, and many more into live, automated, and collaborative business applications. It securely shares data sets online with the rest of your team and users using dynamic charts and graphs.
Automate your business processes to request approvals, notify stakeholders, and give project teams real-time status updates with Tabula. If you are on the lookout for ways to grow your business and detest being stuck with obsolete spreadsheets to process enterprise data, we are here to help. Get in touch with our experts to know how Tabular can help you streamline your workflows and derive deep insights of your data.
