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Now, have a moment of honesty with yourself, how many startups jury on Excel? Probably yours too, right? Since it is used to track costs and lead management, to analyze performance measurements, Excel can be a main support of everyday work. The trick, however, is the following: when your start-up gains traction, these tidy looking spreadsheets can easily become a jumbled mess.
Have you ever been in an excel file and wondered, who made this formula? Or still worse, why is this taking such long? You’re not alone.
The good news? You can find more intelligent methods to simplify the workflow in Excel and improve efficiency without exhausting your staff.
Why Excel is the issue of an Expanding Company
Excel is powerful, no doubt. Never was it intended to support advanced, high scale work flows. Startups are fast and handling spreadsheets manually cannot last forever.
Common pain points include:
- Manual data entry errors
- Version control issues
- Wastage of time on repetitive jobs.
- Problem with incorporating Excel information into other applications.
Sound familiar? Excel is not useful anymore because at certain point it is slacking the process down.
What can Startups do about it?
The first step is to recognize routine jobs.
The first thing you have to do is to ask yourself a simple question; What do we do again and again in Excel?
Is it cleaning data? Importing reports? Pasting numbers in one sheet to another? These actions of repetition are the greatest efficiency killers.
After locating them, you will be in a position to know that there are a lot of tasks in Excel which do not require a human being. Smarter tools can replace automation, and that’s where smarter tools can be used.
Extract and Process data in an Automated Manner
Finding the data in the Excel files and converting it to work in other systems is one of the greatest time wasters of startups. The conversion of spreadsheets to the structured formats manually is time consuming and it is more likely to cause errors.
This is where there are the modern solutions. The Excel parsing API converts spreadsheet data into usable JSON format. That is to say that your uncooked Excel data can automatically get into dashboards, applications, or databases without fabrication.
You should imagine all the time that your team can save by removing copy-paste processes. Sounds appealing, right?
Standardize Excel Framework
The other pitfall that startups make is letting everyone make his/her spreadsheets the way he/she wants. It is anarchy, a variety of formats, different column names, different formulas.
Standardization is key.
Create clear templates for:
- Financial tracking
- Sales pipelines
- Inventory management
- Reporting dashboards
Automation is facilitated and there is increased cooperation when all are of the same structure. In addition, it makes the task of onboarding the new team members much less stressful.
Since there is a way to be clear, why bother with confusion?
Excel is not a Destination | It is a Source of Data
The following is the attitude change that most startups require: Excel is not the end of your workflow. It should be a starting point.
Don’t have to manually analyze data within spreadsheets, integrate Excel with other applications, such as analytics tools, customer relationship management, or internal applications. This will ensure less reliance on manual reporting as well as provide you with real-time insights.
Question to self: Do we have to open Excel each time we feel like having a report? Probably not.
Automate and Decrease Human Mistakes
It is true to fact that humans are erroneous. Particularly in situations where they are exhausted or in a hurry or when working with a high volume of data. One miscalculation and a misplaced decimal point may cause points.
Computerized processes minimize this risk. Automatic transfer of data between systems means that there is minimal error opportunities and trust in your figures.
Would you not prefer a system to a system of checking up every spreadsheet by hand?
Train your Team the Smart Way
The point is that it is not only the tools that will streamline the workflow in Excel: people are also involved. Most of the teams apply excel in a small scale just because they are never aware of the existence of other alternatives.
Take some time and train:
- Introduction to the fundamentals of automation.
- Promote more clean data.
- Demonstrate integration of Excel with bigger processes.
Adoption is easier when your team knows the reason as to why these changes are occurring.Start Small, S
