It’s repetitive, prone to errors, and time-consuming, but you have to do it.
So you have a manual process and to do it, you use one sheet, or five or ten. Copy and paste from the first spreadsheet to the one that helps you with “that” calculation, then to another that helps you with that lookup, and this takes one hour, or five or ten. It’s a repetitive job, but it’s important, it takes way too long to do, but you need to do it, you suspect it could be done quicker, but you don’t know how, we do.
Spreadsheets underpin so many of our most important processes, but manual processes can become complicated, more nuanced, and unique only to you, so more general online apps cost large amounts monthly and only partially solves your problem. Jobs that are, in essence, really simple tasks, can take hours to do in Spreadsheets.
The drawbacks of keeping your manual process.
Increasing Complexity of Manual process
Over time, as the nuance of your business develops and evolves, so do the processes that underpin that business. Making them more prone to errors, harder to track, complete and teach.
Lost Time
As your business grows, the greater the scale of the process. Taking time away from the minds that would be more valuable to you facing other problems.
Processes become harder to teach to new-joiners
Hard to teach process become difficult when on-boarding new joiners. Who have to spend time learning a non-transferable skill, which can demotivate your team to complete their work with quality.
You Create Critical points of failure
It’s never pleasant to receive a call on your holiday because nobody else knows the process like you do. But sometimes it cannot be avoided. If only a few know your critical processes, your company is exposed and faces increased risk should those process-experts leave.
Prone to errors
Humans are wonderful! But Human-error is real. It is hard to ask anyone to be 100% accurate and consistent, 100% of the time but you need that.