Excel isn't the enemy
Almost every system I build starts by replacing a spreadsheet. But the problem is almost never Excel.
Almost every project I take on starts the same way: a client with an operation living in Excel and the feeling that “it can’t keep up anymore.” The conversation usually opens with something like “we need a real system.”
And then I tell them something they don’t expect: Excel isn’t the enemy.
Excel went as far as it was meant to
A spreadsheet is the most honest tool there is for understanding a business. It’s flexible, immediate, and anyone can change it without asking a developer for permission. That’s why small businesses use it for everything.
The problem doesn’t appear when you use Excel. It appears when three different people edit the same sheet, when a formula breaks and nobody notices for two weeks, or when “the good file” stops being obvious.
The real problem is definitions
When I migrate an Excel file to a system, the hard part is almost never technical. It’s that the people filling in the sheet and the people reading the reports don’t agree on what the numbers mean.
A real example: on one project, “monthly sales” meant three different things depending on who you asked. To the owner it was invoiced. To accounting, collected. To the salesperson, committed.
None of them were wrong. Nobody had just written it down.
// What looks like a trivial technical decision...
type Sale = {
date: Date;
amount: number;
status: "committed" | "invoiced" | "collected";
};
// ...is really a business agreement nobody had made explicit.
How I approach it
Before promising to replace anything, I spend the first week understanding. I talk to whoever fills in the sheet every day, not just whoever signs the contract. That person knows where the patches are and why they exist.
What’s left
The goal isn’t to kill Excel for fashion. It’s to reach the point where your operation has a single source of truth, clear rules about who can change what, and reports everyone reads the same way.
When that happens, Excel goes back to what it was always good at: a tool for exploring, not for holding up the entire business.