Your business runs on a spreadsheet. Here is what the audits found.

Almost every company we work with has one spreadsheet that the business depends on. A price list. An order tracker. A payment register. Someone built it years ago, it grew, and now nobody wants to touch the formulas.

Spreadsheets are excellent tools. They are poor systems. The difference matters because of what the audits found.

What the audits found

• A 2024 study reported errors in 94% of spreadsheets used for business decisions (Poon et al., 2024).
• A single reviewer finds only 34 to 69% of the errors in a spreadsheet (Panko). Careful checking is not enough.

These are not careless people. Spreadsheets have no structure that prevents errors: no types, no permissions, no history of who changed what, and formulas that quietly break when a row is inserted.

Five signs the spreadsheet has become the system

1. Several people edit it. And there are versions with names like "final_v3_new".
2. Money depends on it. Prices, markups, payments or commissions are calculated in it.
3. It is the only place a rule is written. The discount logic, the compatibility table, the assembly coefficient.
4. Someone rebuilds a report from it every month. By hand.
5. One person understands it. When they're away, nobody changes anything.

Three or more, and the spreadsheet is no longer a tool. It's an unprotected database.

What it looked like in practice

The panel maker in Quoted by hand. Then not. had an 85 MB price list: 20 sheets, hundreds of images, no structure. The engineer quoted from it. The director applied markups from memory. Nobody could say which version was current.

We imported it into a catalogue of 1,887 items in 223 analog groups by function, type, poles, rating and breaking capacity. Each category has a risk flag. The pricing formula runs through every order the same way. Every stage change is logged.

Quotes still export to Excel. The spreadsheet became an output, not the source.

The Italian picture

In Italy the gap between small and large companies is wide. 41.9% of SMEs analyse their data, against 83.6% of large companies (Istat, 2025). Across the EU, 11.5% of small companies use business intelligence, against 69.2% of large ones (Eurostat, 2025).

When Italian SMEs do move their core processes into management software, the reported effects are large: 83% gained control over their processes, 80% saw fewer errors and 48% saw profitability rise (Osservatori Politecnico di Milano). These are self-reported survey results, not measurements, but the pattern is consistent.

What to move out first

You don't need to replace every spreadsheet. Move the ones that pass the five-sign test, in this order:

1. Anything that calculates money. Prices, markups, payments.
2. Anything several people edit. Order trackers, schedules.
3. Anything that holds a rule. Compatibility, substitutions, approval limits.

Keep spreadsheets for analysis, forecasts and one-off work. That is what they're good at.

A test you can run today

Ask the person who maintains your most important spreadsheet two questions. Which formulas would you be nervous to change? Who else could fix them if they broke? The answers tell you how much risk the business is carrying in one file.

Related: Four systems, none of them agree · When the engineer is on holiday, the company stops quoting