UK Dynamics 365 & PowerApps partner

Why Spreadsheets Limit Your Business Growth

Excel, Word, databases, contact systems, and sales management systems…

Each time you use one of these in your business it will make growth more difficult.

We find that businesses who have robust systems in place to manage sales orders, opportunities, marketing activity, and customer service queries, often do well in business.

What does robust mean? A robust system is “sturdy in construction” which also means it’s long-lasting and well made.

Systems built on Excel spreadsheets, Word documents or a dedicated database work well for a while but they are typically not long-lasting.

That’s because when your business starts to grow, managing these independent systems get hard.

Management becomes

  • more time consuming
  • prone to error
  • difficult to run the reports

You end up with an infrastructure where customer data is duplicated across the business.

Data duplicated across the business in many excel spreadsheets

The main disadvantages of spreadsheets are

  • Speed
    As your business grows and your databases grows, your spreadsheets will slow. Data entry will be tedious and searching becomes difficult.
  • Mobility
    Spreadsheets don’t work well on mobile devices and you normally would need to be in the office to view it.
  • Security
    Sensitive information can easily be viewed and taken off site
  • Sharing
    It’s tricky for many people to work on one spreadsheet at a time. It’s easy for duplication to happen and there’s no audit trail.

When your business is growing you need the right tools to keep all the moving parts working together. So, you need a tool that stores contact details alongside sales opportunities, products, price lists, sales targets and other critical information.

Maybe you need a CRM?

A robust, scalable, business system solution such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales will grow and adapt alongside your business when you need it to. It:

  • Integrates seamlessly with Outlook for emails, appointments, tasks and phone calls
  • Works side-by-side with Word and Excel
  • Enables you to capture new pieces of data. You can add fields to a screen and create new screens built around a particular role in your business
  • Automates calculations to save time and improve accuracy
  • Creates workflow processes within departments and across your business to improve user productivity
  • Builds interactive pop-up wizards for users, to make training more efficient and reduce the risk of user error

The whole system stores its data in one place, accessible via the web, Outlook, or mobile apps…

and the best part…

it provides first-class reporting using interactive charts, and real-time interactive dashboards that display information from all over your business.

Investing in technology to provide a robust infrastructure for your business helps you to grow with confidence.

You can read more about some of the difficulties that CRM can help to resolve or if you are using a CRM system already perhaps you could get more out of it.

Don’t let spreadsheet and database spread limit your business growth. We thrive on helping business owners and organisations to grow more sustainably by transforming their business databases into robust systems.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help to support your business goals and there hasn’t been a better time to start using it.

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📆 Last update: February 6, 2025

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