Walk into most small Island businesses and somewhere on a laptop there's a spreadsheet doing a job nobody quite signed up for. It tracks the jobs, or the stock, or who's paid and who hasn't. It started small. It grew. And now the whole thing leans on it — even though only one person really knows how it works.
This isn't a dig. Spreadsheets are brilliant. But there's an honest conversation worth having about the ones that have quietly become load-bearing, because when they wobble, the business wobbles with them.
Why it always ends up here
Nobody set out to run the firm on a spreadsheet. It happens because a spreadsheet is the easiest tool in the world to start with. It's already on the computer, it costs nothing, and you can build exactly what you need in an afternoon. So you do.
Then the business grows, the spreadsheet grows with it, and one day it's tracking things it was never built for. By then it's too useful to throw away and too tangled to rebuild. That's not a mistake. That's just how a good shortcut turns into the thing everything depends on.
The risks nobody talks about
None of these are dramatic on a normal day. They bite on the bad day, which is exactly when you can least afford it.
One person understands it
This is the big one. The spreadsheet was built by someone, and it lives in their head as much as on the screen. If they're off sick, on holiday, or they leave, nobody else can pull the same numbers out of it. The business doesn't stop, but it limps — and you find out how much you relied on one person at the worst possible moment.
A typo nobody catches
A figure typed in the wrong cell, a formula dragged one row too far, a column quietly broken months ago. Spreadsheets don't warn you. They just give you a wrong answer with the same confidence as a right one, and you act on it — quote off it, pay off it, plan off it.
Which version is the real one
There's the one on the laptop, the one emailed last Tuesday, and the copy someone made "just to be safe." Three versions, three slightly different sets of numbers, and a slow argument about which is right. Time goes on sorting that out instead of doing the work.
The hours it quietly eats
Copying figures across, tidying it up, re-doing the bit that broke, building the same summary by hand every month. None of it feels big in the moment. Added up over a year, it's a serious chunk of someone's time spent keeping a spreadsheet alive rather than running the business.
When a spreadsheet is genuinely fine
Here's the part most people selling you something won't say: plenty of spreadsheets are perfectly good and should be left exactly where they are.
If it's simple, one person uses it, and it'd be no drama to rebuild — leave it alone. Not every spreadsheet is a problem waiting to happen.
A quick calculation. A list you glance at. A one-off model for a decision you'll make once. These don't need replacing with a "system." Swapping a working spreadsheet for software you have to learn, pay for and maintain is often a step backwards. The test is simple: would it hurt if this broke or the person who made it left? If not, it's fine.
How to move off the worst bits — sensibly
The mistake is thinking the fix is a big, scary system that runs the whole company. It almost never is. You don't replace everything. You find the one or two spreadsheets that would genuinely hurt to lose, and you deal with just those.
- Find the load-bearing ones. Which spreadsheet, if it broke or its owner left tomorrow, would actually cause you a problem? That short list is where to look — and usually it's far shorter than you'd fear.
- Write down what it does. Even a page of plain notes explaining how the important one works means it no longer lives in one person's head. That alone removes the biggest risk, and it costs you an afternoon.
- Tidy before you move. Half the mess can be fixed in the spreadsheet itself — kill the duplicate copies, fix the broken column, agree one master version everyone uses.
- Only then think about software. If a job is being done by ten people, changing every day, and the spreadsheet keeps breaking, that's when something purpose-built starts to pay for itself. Not before.
Done this way it isn't a big project. It's a sensible tidy-up of a few things that matter, leaving the rest alone.
Where to start
You don't need us for the first step. Pick the one spreadsheet you'd least want to lose, and ask yourself who else could run it if the person who built it walked out on Monday. If the answer is "nobody," you've found the thing worth sorting first.
If you'd like a hand working out which of your spreadsheets are genuinely risky and which to happily leave alone — with no push to rip everything out and replace it — have a quick chat. We'll tell you straight, and often the honest answer is "less needs doing than you think."