Spreadsheets are powerful tools for number crunching, but are they a good solution for project management or job costing? While spreadsheet templates can seem like a cost-effective way to manage your projects, there are a lot of pitfalls that could be costing your business in the long run.
Here are five reasons to be cautious when using free spreadsheet templates for your business job costing:
Data cannot be updated in real-time with spreadsheets. Because the spreadsheets need to be manually updated, there is always a delay between when something is done and when it is reported. This means you never have an up-to-date look at your records, which can make it difficult to make informed decisions.
Manual updating is also time-consuming. This means the relationship between the data sets cannot help with decision-making or provide insights.
Spreadsheets can certainly organize data, allowing you to view details in one document, but they are not necessarily good for keeping information easily accessible and connected when there are many moving parts.
For example, you may want a spreadsheet that shows all your active projects and allows you to track their progress. Storing all this information in one spreadsheet would make it complex and hard to get quick insights from, but splitting it across multiple sheets means that you'll need to update both sheets when the project is complete.
Unfortunately, without multi-document macros, spreadsheets require you to constantly move data manually between different spreadsheets for scheduling, quoting, invoicing, and even forecasting job costs.
Accurate maintenance of spreadsheets can often be difficult, especially when only a limited amount of detail can be listed for projects on single rows or columns. . The number of "layers" to a project is limited in spreadsheets, so you can't rely on detailed records.
That means key steps can be easily missed or miscommunicated, which pushes out project completion and delay urgent tasks. Spreadsheets, unfortunately, have no way of adjusting to accommodate these dependencies or new additional project tasks
The information in spreadsheets typically does not allow for quick, frequent updates. Large spreadsheets constantly have data changes whenever they change hands, and whoever uses the latest version of the file is usually charged with ensuring it is safe, accurate, and uncorrupted.
This is inefficient and time-consuming, but it can also lead to more errors because it’s difficult to accurately record and track where major projects were 12 days ago, let alone 12 months ago.
Even Forbes says Spreadsheets are Killing your Business
Spreadsheets system don’t force you (or even let you) to attach purchase orders, invoices, receipts and timesheets to a project’s history. Because of that, it’s all too tempting to put an “estimated” (read guess) value in the spreadsheet to give you a starting point. The problem happens when that guess becomes relied upon as real data, rather than the made-up data that it is, and if you rely on it, you’re cooked!
There’s also no way to do a reliability check on that data without manually going back over every timesheet record and invoice, which is an enormous time and cost burden—I bet you’re not going to put that into that spreadsheet as a job-related cost!
If you’ve realised that spreadsheets are killing YOUR business, perhaps it’s time to move to a proper job management platform like WorkGuru.
After relying on spreadsheets, transitioning to a job management system can massively increase your team's overall productivity, thanks to information transparency, reduced errors, and shared workloads.
Along with the responsibility for updating the project happens automatically, the increased productivity means more accurately completed projects with happier customers and employees alike.