Running Your Business on Spreadsheets

Whitepaper

The Downside

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Introduction

When an organization is starting out the main focus tends to be on three business critical topics: branding, getting a product or service to market, and controlling costs. To keep track of these areas, companies turn to spreadsheets to manage many tasks including payroll, bookkeeping, and even employee scheduling. However, as the business grows and needs change, using just a spreadsheet can quickly turn into a major hindrance rather than an asset.

One of the most popular uses of spreadsheets in the early stages of any company is scheduling of employees. Scheduling itself is a thankless and dif�cult job. It can take time to �nd the right employee to �ll the shift based on both your cost restrictions and your employ-ees’ personal preferences. When creating any schedule, your employees’ availability as well as speci�c site and shift quali�cations is necessary to consider. This however, becomes more dif�cult to manage as your customer base grows and complexity increases. To explain the bene�ts and transition points within the scheduling process, this whitepaper will look at the advantages of using spreadsheets while the business is small and the adjustments your business will likely face as the business grows.

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Why start with spreadsheets?

There are many key advantages when using spreadsheets in the early stages of your business from the point of view of cost, familiarity and versatility. Some of these advantages are:

It’s FreeSpreadsheet tools are generally free or come as part of your computer’s toolkit. Therefore, it’s readily available and typically doesn’t accrue any additional cost.

It’s FamiliarMost people are familiar from an early stage with their productivity tools that come with your of�ce computer. People use them at home and at school. This breeds familiarity and ease of use when you begin using these tools in a business scenario.

It’s VersatileSpreadsheets are versatile for any new business. It can be used for many different business tasks including accounting, maintaining customer records, generating invoices and keeping track of your payables.

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Problems with Using Spreadsheets

As with anything that seems too good to be true, it usually is. As your business grows, managing critical aspects within a spreadsheet becomes more and more dif�cult. This section looks at some of the problems that will be encountered as your business needs outgrow the spreadsheet capabilities.

Spreadsheets aren’t collaborativeHow do you share information from your spreadsheet with partners or managers? How do you allow them to collaborate? When the business is small, collaboration typically occurs between a few people. In other words, when you’re small, it’s easy to walk over to a person’s desk and provide or get feedback immediately. However, this isn’t a practical approach when you have multiple locations with multiple managers who all need to contribute and provide feedback.

Spreadsheets aren’t scalableSimilar to the problem with collaboration, as you add more complexity to your business, your original spreadsheet design will need to be modi�ed. It will continually need modi�cations as you grow to add more employees, locations, special skills and other key business items. All of these added complexities will result in last minute changes and modi�cations. Within spreadsheets, there will be no audit log of what, when, and who performed any changes unless a strict manual process to log changes is followed. This introduces unnecessary risk into your business that can result in major headaches and possible lack of accountability if staff knows that if they make a mistake, no one will be able to trace it back to them.

Spreadsheets aren’t integrated with other core applicationsAs your business grows and you introduce other software tools, data from both your software productivity tools may not easily integrate with each other. This means someone will need to manually input data from the spreadsheet into one or more systems (swivel chair integration). As your business grows manual processes will not scale, taking more time and ultimately leading to higher costs. Ideally you want to automate as much of your process to help reduce manual efforts.

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Spreadsheets Increase the Chance of Input ErrorsSpreadsheets are inherently error prone. Two of the common errors are the setup of formulas and particularly complex formulas, and incorrect values keyed into cells (typically called a fat �nger error). Although these can be mitigated by reducing the number of people editing the spreadsheet as well as having someone double-check the data, at some point an error will be introduced. The only �x for these errors is manual effort: tracing through a spreadsheet to locate an error which can be tedious and time consuming work. This only increases with the increase in spreadsheet complexity.

Spreadsheet tools need to be managedAlthough there are cloud based versions of spreadsheets, to get the most �exible product, you typically need to install it on your computer. This means constant maintenance on the computer storing the data, as well as constant backups to ensure nothing is lost in case of a virus or computer failure. If you do not backup your �les and there is a hardware failure, you run the risk of losing or corrupting key business �les.

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Scheduling Software

Eventually your business will grow to a size where you will need to consider speci�c tools for speci�c business problems. Some examples include �nding an accounting system, a payroll system and a workforce management tool to manage your growing workforce. This is where automated, cloud based scheduling software can assist. Over the last few years there has been a concerted push towards cloud applications which overcome many of the challenges associated with spreadsheets. Speci�cally, a cloud based scheduling tool will allow you to collaborate amongst managers and employees and be accessible from anywhere you have an internet connection.

Here are a few ways Celayix can help you realize the advantages of using a cloud based scheduling and time and attendance application while helping you reach your business potential:

Eliminate human errors in manual processes and spreadsheets

Help you collaborate with your employees

Eliminate avoidable overtime costs

Eliminate buddy punching and time theft costs

Dramatically reduce the time spent to reconcile, audit and process schedules and time & attendance data

Save time and money by reducing workforce turnover

Share data with other core applications easily

Celayix Software delivers a powerful suite of workforce management tools, including employee scheduling software, time & attendance and employee communication for customers from various industries. Our solutions are designed to meet the needs of small and medium businesses while addressing the complexity of enterprise organizations.