Is it time to ditch the spreadsheets in favour of business automation?Human error It is really quite mind-bogglingly easy to make a human error on a spreadsheet that can go on to have huge ramifications for a business. A cell out of place can throw out an entire formula and when the numbers don’t add up, it means retracing your steps from the beginning. An error in a spreadsheet can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Time consuming Spreadsheets are fiddly and often repetitive work and it’s easy for anyone to make a mistake under these circumstances. It takes up an awful lot of time and even more if you make a mistake. Business automation frees up employees doing these tasks to work on other tasks and become more productive. Alex Tebbs, founder of cloud communications tool VIA, told Business Advice his business looks to automate as many processes as it can. We have a turnover of 3m but only 15 employees, which is very low for our type of business, he said. Giving himself more time away from admin has allowed him to build more strategic relationships with companies and resellers. We are hiring more staff, so I can continue to move from a sales role to a more strategic one, he added. Hard to scale Partly because of just how fiddly they are, spreadsheets are difficult to scale. As a business grows, and there are more and more invoices and clients to juggle, it just becomes an unworkable situation. They are also hard to share and work on collaboratively, which just isnt practical by the time a business has three or four offices dotted about the country. Raj Sond, GM at First Data UK, said: The most common mistakes made by small business owners are leaving it too long before updating the books as well as inaccurate and inconsistent bookkeeping. bad bookkeeping habits can cost businesses time and money. However, clever technology can manage and make sure invoice and other account data is stored instantly, correctly and all in one place avoiding the panic raid of the filing cabinet to find a rogue invoice or order. Interpretation problems Data on a spreadsheet can be difficult to interpret, whereas some business automation platforms will offer analytics that make it much easier to break down. For example, it can be difficult to produce a cash flow forecast from a spreadsheet, especially one that’s growing in all directions and becoming unmanageable. Depending on the process you are trying to automate, there may be software out there that it specifically designed to handle it.
