Spreadsheets are a great way for any business to track client, job, and any other records. However, spreadsheets can get a company into trouble if they outgrow their spreadsheets and don't take action to remedy it. In this article you will find reason to be wary of spreadsheets. This doesn't mean not to use them. Rather, to use them wisely and be aware that these pitfalls exist. After all knowledge is power.
Data is the life blood of any business. Accurate data is gold, inaccurate data can cost us a great deal of money and time to fix. Let's face it, we're human. Humans make mistakes. It's part of life that we need to except. To this end we can recognize why errors in our data exists. It really comes down to a few main areas where we as, data entry users, make mistakes.
In order to add a record or edit a record in a spreadsheet. We first need to find the record. We pull up that row. Now if there are any dependencies on our data we need to manually cross check for those dependencies. Once we have verified our dependencies, we can begin. Now i can enter the records.
Another issue with spreadsheets is that most of them are local copies. This means that if we both open a spreadsheet, we can have different data on both of our sheets because we have saved them on our own machine. This can be worked around by using cloud based spreadsheet solutions.
Data is the gospel you should use to make business decisions. If your reports take all week to format and produce, well, you are not getting very timely data. If your data had any issues going in that caused inaccuracy, your reports are not as useful as they should be. Reports should be accurate and not cost you labor hours to produce.
