Moving Beyond Spreadsheets

Moving Beyond Spreadsheets: How Custom Apps Save Money

Spreadsheets have some issues as number-crunching solutions. See how custom apps can help. The spreadsheet seemed like a good idea at the time. But that time was 1978. If your company is still using spreadsheets to make predictions or analyze data, you're probably risking a lot on a program that may be full of errors. If you're running your business on a 40-year-old idea, let's take a look at how today's updates can make your business better.

 Spreadsheet history

Spreadsheets started long before computers. Accountants and other number crunchers used to tape sheets of paper together so they could keep track of data. Dan Bricklin created spreadsheets for computers in the late 1970s. The program, VisiCalc, became part of the Apple II, and Steve Jobs credited that program with helping the computer succeed. The concept changed the view of computers from gaming machines to tools. Lotus 1-2-3 followed soon after; Microsoft released Excel in the early 1980s.

 Spreadsheets made it far easier for people to run new numbers and calculate ideas. Instead of spending a day erasing pieces of paper, accountants could quickly estimate what a change in the price of a product might cost a company. People had a way to view data and felt confident that the computer wouldn't make a mathematical error.

 Spreadsheet failures

But spreadsheets have always had a weakness: humans. Recent studies observe that up to 9 in 10 spreadsheets have errors. Other studies indicate about 88 percent of our spreadsheets contain errors. By either calculation, such mistakes cost companies billions of dollars. For example, Joe is typing in costs and enters seven digits instead of six. While spreadsheets sometimes recognize errors in a formula, it will not know that $1,223,654 was supposed to be $223,654.

 Spreadsheets are also …

 Vulnerable to fraud. Spreadsheets are set up to be easy, but it's also easy to change formulas or values without notice.

Non-collaborative. If you're using locally saved spreadsheets, your team may be sending various versions back and forth across email just to try to get all the numbers recorded. Further, a person's spreadsheet becomes personalized based on the way they work. If someone else takes over, they may have to just start over.

Hard to merge. Want to combine data from one sheet to another? That will take some work, and you'll no doubt generate errors in the copy-paste process.

Causing regulatory problems. More regulations are cropping up related to spreadsheets, and more are coming.

Beyond spreadsheets: Custom apps

Spreadsheets served us well for decades, but with so much room for error, managers are seeking ways to do business better. And there is a better way: custom apps.

 Today's technology has brought us volumes of data. Such data is automatically generated and can be presented in far better ways than rows and columns.

 Custom applications for your business offer many improvements over a spreadsheet:

 More accurate. Ditch the errors! Plus, AI-based programs can learn what's expected in your figures and alert you if something seems wrong.

Easier to use. Although Excel brought us menus and shortcuts, a custom app comes with a dashboard – one that doesn't require oodles of formula knowledge to operate.

More secure. Anyone can make changes to a spreadsheet, but automatically generated data is just there. Your team members are assigned usernames and passwords to access it, and the information is stored on a secure server.

More collaborative. Various members of your team can log in to your app dashboard to see data, run charts and add information. The program can track who changes what for better security and clarity.

Faster calculations. Spreadsheets are quick, but our technology has gotten even faster. With a custom app, you can click a button and immediately get the answer.

Better visuals. Spreadsheets generate some charts, of course, but a custom app will produce a variety of charts, graphs and other visualizations to give your team a sense of what's happening. Custom apps can track work expenses, visualize business data, handle bookkeeping, review invoices, manage projects, schedule employees and more. No matter how your company data is set up now, you can build a custom app to calculate, visualize and analyze far better.

 *Article credit: Michael Georgiou /Business.com