Gotta love a spreadsheet. Anyone with an ounce of geek in them (and there’s 80+kg of gook in me!) will love to knock up some calculations in Excel, Google Sheets or whatever. It might be your business planning, or it might be to help your teenager plan for taking a gap year.
But there comes a point where spreadsheets stop being useful and become cumbersome. We see this in clients again and again, especially those with a particularly technical sales and deliver process. See if this ‘spreadsheet hell’ scenario sounds familiar.
Typically, there will be a spreadsheet template that is used for new quotations. This has been developed over a long period and contains several sheets with calculations specific to that business. This then feeds back to a main worksheet, that summarises all of the prices. The salesperson will create a new copy of this template, fill it in, and then export the pricing to a document template that forms the quote to be sent to the client. These are all saved on a shared server somewhere with a very specific naming convention.
The salesperson copy-pastes the main details of the quote into a quote log of some form – another spreadsheet. This is used for sales forecasting and the like with pivot tables.
Once an order is placed, a further spreadsheet tracks the delivery of the order, which may also involve updating more worksheets in the quote and probably a separate scheduling system.
It works, all the data the business needs is captured, but once you reach a certain size it becomes cumbersome and clunky. Spreadsheets get corrupted, and don’t like being worked on by more than one person concurrently. Having all the data in individual files makes reporting hard.
Imagine having all of this data in a single system? One where it was all backed up securely, everything flowed automatically from one stage to the other and you could report automatically on key business stats.
Well, that is basically what we do. We are excellent at taking spreadsheet-based processes and putting them into a sales and operations system. Our new product, Taskation, is designed to do just that. And of course it can be customised to do exactly what you need.
So, if this sounds like you, do book a discovery call and see how we can help!