The week the spreadsheet person is out
You know the file. It's the one that runs a big piece of your business, and exactly one person knows how it works. Where the numbers come from. Which tabs you don't touch. Which cell blows up the whole thing if you type in it wrong.
Then she takes a week off. Or she's out sick. And the work just stops. Nobody else will open it because last time somebody sorted one column and not the others and it took an afternoon to put back. So the team waits. And you're answering questions you shouldn't have to answer, from a file you can't read.
Here's why it happens. A spreadsheet grows one patch at a time. Somebody needed a number, so they added a formula. Then another. A year later it's a machine held together with tape, and only the person who taped it knows where the seams are. It was never built to be handed off. It was built to get through Tuesday.
A home services company with more than 60 brands lived this. Every brand rolled up its budget in its own spreadsheet, and pulling them together was a person's whole job. We turned that into a real app tied straight into their accounting system, so every brand plans in one place and the numbers come from one place. No more retyping. No more one person who's the only one who understands it.
Leaving it alone has a price, and you already pay it. It's the afternoons spent fixing the file instead of doing the work. It's the week that stalls when the wrong person is out. It's the goof-up nobody catches because nobody else can see inside. A spreadsheet only one person understands isn't a tool. It's a single point of failure with your name on the payroll.
Fixing it looks like this: the same information, but as a real app with logins, so people only see what's theirs. A history, so you can tell who changed what. Reports that just show up instead of getting rebuilt by hand. If that's your file, that's exactly what we built the Fix-it Sprint for. One fixed price, two to three weeks, and the file becomes something your whole team can use. Reply and tell me what your spreadsheet does.
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