On a Friday afternoon, someone asks in the company chat who has the commission Excel. The response takes fifteen minutes because the only person who really understands it is on vacation, and no one else dares to open the file for fear of breaking a formula that hasn't been reviewed in three years. If this scene sounds familiar, you are not alone. It is, with different file names and different protagonists, one of the most common situations we encounter when we start diagnosing the operation of a medium-sized company.
How it gets there
No company decides to build its management system in Excel; it happens gradually, almost always with good intentions. Someone creates a sheet to organize a specific process because the current system doesn't solve it, or because implementing something formal seems like a disproportionate effort for a problem that at that moment seems small.
Then a macro comes to automate a repetitive calculation. Then a second tab that depends on the first, and a third person who starts feeding the file without fully understanding its internal logic. Each step, viewed in isolation, is a reasonable decision. The company did not decide to build an ERP in Excel: it got there without realizing it, one adjustment at a time.
The signs that the line has already been crossed
There is a point at which that file stops being a support tool and becomes critical infrastructure, although no one has formally declared it that way. Some signs tend to coincide when that happens: a macro with business rules that only one person in the entire company knows how to modify, a file on which an entire area depends to be able to invoice, pay commissions, or close the month, nested formulas so complex that no one dares to touch them for fear of breaking something they wouldn't know how to fix. Several versions of the same file circulating by email, each with slightly different data, and no one completely sure which one is the definitive one. None of these signs, separately, seem serious. Together, they describe a system on which the business depends, without any of the protections that a system should have.
Why this keeps the operation leader awake at night
The real risk is not aesthetic. It's not that Excel is less elegant than a dedicated system, but that this file concentrates all the dependency on a single person, and if that person gets sick, resigns, or is simply on vacation the day something goes wrong, the entire company feels it. It's about the fact that there is no record of who changed what or when, so when a number doesn't add up, no one can accurately reconstruct what happened. It's about formula or copying errors that can circulate for months without anyone detecting them, until they appear at the worst possible moment: an audit, a month-end closing with the board waiting for results, a funding round where someone external starts asking questions about how the numbers are calculated. And above all, it doesn't scale, that is, what worked with 10 orders a month becomes unsustainable with 100, and by then, migrating stops being a planned improvement and becomes an urgency managed under pressure.
What does this mean for those who lead IT or processes
Reaching this point is not a management failure. It is to be expected when an operation grows faster than its systems, and it happens to the vast majority of companies that are in a stage of real growth. The question worth asking is not how it got to this point, but something more concrete, which is that if the person who understands that file were to leave tomorrow, could the company continue to operate with the same reliability? If the team doubles next year, would that file hold up, or would it start to fail just when it is needed the most? If the answer raises doubts, it is already time to evaluate what part of that Excel should live in a real system, before a crisis ends up making the decision.
The next time someone asks in the company chat who has the file, it is worth ensuring that the answer does not depend on a single person being available to respond.
Let's talk if your operation has a process that has already exceeded what a spreadsheet can securely hold.