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5 reasons to avoid using spreadsheets in management

Find out why using Excel spreadsheets can jeopardize your company's management and how modern solutions offer more efficiency.

Guilherme Barbassa

Guilherme Barbassa is CEO of Actio Software, with over 20 years of experience in strategic management and business transformation. He works in the integration between strategy, governance, and technology, supporting senior leadership in building results-oriented management systems.

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" 5 reasons to avoid using spreadsheets in management

5 reasons to avoid using spreadsheets in management

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As a company grows, so does the complexity of management. The controls that used to be done only in the entrepreneur's head gain tools supported by technology to better understand the company's scenario, and employees are given more support in carrying out their activities so that they can do their jobs better and in less time. The road to this transformation is usually paved with spreadsheets, which are very useful tools, but not as reliable as you might think. Interested in finding out why? Read on and discover 5 reasons to avoid using spreadsheets in your company's management!

Information security and reliability

Spreadsheets are easy to fill in, but they can also have their data changed or deleted at any time, creating a huge problem for you. Incorrect data, loss of information and corrupted spreadsheets are some of the barriers that your company certainly doesn't need to face.

Information repository versus business intelligence

If you're just storing data and don't expect to get anything out of it, perhaps a spreadsheet will do the trick. But if you want to increase competitiveness of your company, you need a tool that reads this data and extracts relevant reports and insights, showing you the path you need to follow to achieve your business goals.

Usability for everyone

Making simple spreadsheets may be an easy task, but enabling macros, generating interdependencies between documents, creating formulas and generating reports requires in-depth knowledge of spreadsheets, logic and mathematics, knowledge that not everyone has. In other words, if you need to put someone in charge of managing certain aspects of your company, you'll have to hire a specialist and access to information will be restricted, which could have an impact on the performance of your entire team.

Productivity and rework are inversely proportional

Even though spreadsheets can be interconnected, this process makes it increasingly time-consuming to update information, which leads to dispersed controls that don't contribute to building your business. competitive intelligence. As your team has more spreadsheets to update and analyze, productivity drops, as does the quality of work, damaging your company's performance.

Updating data or sharing information

Updating spreadsheets is a time-consuming job that can compromise the decision-making process at a delicate moment for your company, such as a new business opportunity or even in the face of a crisis. Ideally, you should have strategic information concentrated in a single place and be able to assess the present and plan for the future of your company in just a few minutes.

And how do we get around these problems?

Technology is becoming more advanced every day and today we enjoy complete and easily customizable business management systems in the cloud, allowing your company to be managed with quality, security and competence. A Strategy Execution Platform concentrates your business information in a single place, cross-references the stored data and generates analytical reports that reveal the best paths to take for your company's growth.