A client showed me a spreadsheet last week. Fourteen tabs, colour coded, genuinely impressive.
Their finance manager built it in an afternoon in 2021. It now runs supplier payments for a company of 80 people.
I asked what would happen if she left. Long pause. Then: we would be in serious trouble for about four months.
So I asked a different question. How much of her week does the spreadsheet take?
Around 40 percent. She earns $84,000. Call it $33,000 a year of a senior finance salary spent on manual entry, reconciliation and chasing people for approval by email.
Add the two junior hours a day it creates elsewhere and you are past forty thousand dollars. For a file that started as a favour to herself.
This is the part owners miss. The spreadsheet is not the problem. It was the right answer in 2021, when the company was 25 people and the alternative was nothing.
The problem is that it never got promoted. Volume grew, the file stayed exactly what it was, and everybody got used to paying the difference in salary.
We are replacing it over five weeks. She keeps the judgement calls and reviews exceptions each morning. The typing stops.
Go and find the spreadsheet in your company. Every business has one. Then ask two questions: how many hours does it eat, and what happens if the person who built it resigns on a Monday?
You will not like the second answer. That is the useful part.
Originally posted on LinkedIn.
