Spreadsheets vs a facilities management platform: when to switch

It's easy to treat "still using spreadsheets" as an automatic sign a facilities team is behind. In practice, a genuinely well-maintained spreadsheet, kept up by one disciplined person managing a small estate, can work perfectly well for a long time. The question isn't really whether spreadsheets are inherently wrong — it's whether the specific conditions that make them workable are actually still true for your estate.

Where spreadsheets genuinely hold up

A single building or small handful of sites, one or two people responsible for keeping records current, and a manageable number of assets is a genuinely reasonable fit for a well-structured spreadsheet. The discipline required is real but achievable at that scale, and there's no inherent reason to spend money solving a problem that isn't actually causing pain yet.

Where they start to break down

The strain shows up predictably as an estate grows: more buildings means more people touching the same records, which means more chances for someone to overwrite something or work from an outdated copy. More assets means more rows to scroll through to find what's overdue, rather than having it surface automatically. And crucially, a spreadsheet has no way to tie a statutory finding to a tracked job through to sign-off — that link has to be maintained manually, which is exactly the kind of manual step where things get missed.

• –Multiple people updating the same records regularly, with no reliable way to prevent conflicting edits
• –Growing difficulty answering "what's overdue right now" without manually scanning or filtering
• –No structured link between a statutory finding and the job that resolved it
• –Increasing time spent maintaining the spreadsheet itself rather than acting on what it shows
• –A genuine need to evidence compliance quickly, which a spreadsheet can support but not particularly well

The switch itself is the actual cost, not just the licence

Moving off spreadsheets isn't free even when the destination software is priced reasonably — migrating existing records, re-training habits, and living through a period where both systems are partially in use all cost real time. That's worth planning for explicitly rather than assuming a switch happens cleanly overnight, and it's the core of what a smooth implementation actually looks like in practice.

Cost is only one part of that decision too — see our broader look at facilities software pricing if budget is the main thing holding the decision back, since the comparison should be against the real cost of the current process, not against a spreadsheet's licence cost of effectively zero.

The point the sheet stops being trusted

Spreadsheets do not fail loudly. What happens is that a second copy appears, then a third, and over a few months the question "which one is right" becomes genuinely unanswerable. People start checking with each other rather than with the sheet, and at that point the sheet has already stopped being the record even though everybody still maintains it.

The tell is behavioural rather than technical: when somebody asks whether a PPM was done and the answer involves phoning a site rather than opening a file, the sheet is no longer doing the job it is there for.

Common mistakes

• –Multiple copies circulating with no agreed master
• –No audit trail, so an error cannot be traced to when it was introduced
• –Formulas and meaning understood by one person
• –No link between a scheduled task and evidence the work happened
• –Comparing a licence cost against zero rather than against the admin time it replaces
• –Waiting for a visible failure when the failure mode is quiet inaccuracy