Signs 1 & 2 — Spreadsheets as a System, and Tools That Don't Talk
Spreadsheets are not a system — they are a symptom. When a business of more than five people coordinates critical operations through shared Excel or Google Sheets files, it signals that no purpose-built system exists for that workflow. Common manifestations: a 'master tracker' only one person fully understands, weekly reconciliation meetings whose primary purpose is determining whose version is correct, and data one accidental deletion from being permanently lost. Sign 2: every time an employee copies data from one system to another, you are paying for a manual integration that should not exist. A five-minute data-transfer task done twice a day by three people is 250+ hours per year; a 2% error rate on 10,000 manual entries a month means 200 incorrect records per month each requiring identification, investigation and correction.
