We talk businesses out of building software fairly often, and it is usually the same conversation. Somebody has a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet has got big, and big feels like a signal.
Big is not the signal. Here is what is.
What a spreadsheet is genuinely good at
It is worth naming this, because "we should get proper software" is often said about a tool that is doing its job perfectly.
A spreadsheet is instantly changeable by the person using it. It needs no training, no login, no vendor, no monthly fee, and no developer when the business changes shape. Every one of those is a real advantage and software gives all of them up.
If one person maintains it, everybody trusts it, and changing it takes seconds, you do not have a problem. You have a tool.
The four signals that it has actually outgrown it
More than one person is editing it, and you have started keeping versions.
The moment there is a -final-v2-USE THIS ONE in a filename, the spreadsheet
has stopped being one source of truth and become several. This is the strongest
signal and it is usually the first one.
The same record moves through stages, and people are tracking the stage in a colour. Enquiry, quoted, scheduled, done, invoiced. Colour-coded cells work until somebody needs to know how many are stuck at stage three, and then they do not.
Somebody outside the business needs to look at part of it. A customer wanting to see where their order is, without phoning to ask. You cannot hand somebody a spreadsheet with everybody else's records in it, so instead somebody copies a bit of it into an email, by hand, repeatedly.
A mistake in it is expensive and there is nothing stopping one. A spreadsheet will let you type a date in the price column. If that ends up on an invoice, the spreadsheet's flexibility just cost you money.
The signals that are not signals
It has a lot of rows. Spreadsheets handle far more rows than most people think, and row count on its own says nothing about whether the process is working.
It is ugly. It is a tool, not a deliverable.
Somebody said you should have proper software. Ask them which of the four signals above they are seeing. Usually the answer is none of them.
You are bored of it. Genuinely the most common reason, and the most expensive one to act on. Boredom with a working tool is not a business case.
The middle option people forget
Between a spreadsheet and a build, there is a shelf full of off-the-shelf tools that already do most trades' version of this. If one of them fits, it will be cheaper and faster than anything anybody builds you, including us.
The case for building is narrow and real: every tool in the category assumes a way of working that is not yours, and you would spend more time fighting the tool than it saves. That happens. It happens less often than the people selling builds suggest.
What the build actually costs you
Not the price. The weight.
Anything with a login needs somewhere to run, backups that somebody has verified, people added and removed as staff change, and updating when the business changes. That is a fair trade for something saving real hours every week and a bad one for something used twice a month.
Worth knowing before you start, rather than a year in.
How we handle it
The first conversation is what the business does in a week and where the current version breaks down. Roughly a third of the time the honest answer is that the spreadsheet is fine, or that a tool that already exists will do it. We say so, and we would rather say so than build something you regret.
If you want that conversation, ask. There is no charge for it and no project attached to it.