Fix · Operations
“Half the company still runs on spreadsheets.”
The spreadsheets aren't the problem. They're what a capable team builds when the software they needed never arrived.
What is actually going on
It starts reasonably. One sheet, one person, one process. Then it gets copied, someone adds a column, a second version turns up in a different folder, and the number in the board pack stops matching the number in the warehouse.
The workarounds harden into jobs. Somebody's Monday is reconciling. Somebody else chases status in a group chat. A third person is the only one who knows why the formula in row 400 is different. None of that is in anyone's job description and all of it is holding the company up.
The cost almost never gets counted as a software cost. It shows up as headcount, as decisions that take a week, and as the audit you can't pass because the evidence lives in a chat thread.
What we do about it
The operation becomes software you own, with one place every number comes from.
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We map what people actually do
Not the documented process. The real one, workarounds included, because the workarounds are where the requirements are hiding.
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One place the numbers come from
With a history of who changed what. Arguments about which figure is correct stop being a meeting.
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The manual jobs get absorbed
Reconciling, chasing, re-keying between systems. This is precisely what software and an AI workforce are for, and people go back to the parts that need a person.
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Built so it can be audited
If a bank, a regulator or an acquirer is ever going to look at this, the evidence needs to be in the system rather than reconstructed afterwards.
Where we have done this
One client passed a government and a bank audit on a system we built. Others now run the same volume with 4 to 5 people where it used to take 10 or more.
See the case studies →Questions
What people ask next.
Do we have to replace everything at once?
No, and it usually goes badly when people try. We take the process that hurts most, put it in software, and the rest follows once people can see the difference.
What happens to the data in the spreadsheets?
It gets migrated, cleaned and reconciled as part of the build. A new system that starts empty is just a second source of truth, which is the problem you already have.
Will people actually use it?
They use it when it's faster than the spreadsheet. That's the whole reason we map the real process first, including the workarounds people invented to survive the old one.
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