Replacing your Excel with business software

The signs the file has reached its limit

• Several people work in it, and nobody knows who has the right version any more.
• Nobody knows who changed what, or when. A value moved, nobody remembers.
• It does not open on a phone, or opens badly. In the field, you write on paper and copy it in at night.
• A formula broke and the wrong figure circulated for a week before anyone noticed.
• The same information is re-entered: in the file, then in the invoice, then in the email to the customer.
• Only one person understands it. When they are on holiday, so is the file.

One of these signs can be worked around. Three together, and the file is telling you its time is up.

What business software does that a file never will

Business software is not a prettier spreadsheet. It is a tool built around the way you work, with what a file does not have:

• Permissions: everyone sees and edits what concerns them, no more.
• A history: every change is dated and signed. You can go back.
• Several people at once, at the office and in the field, on the same data, without competing versions.
• The phone: enter data on site, photograph a receipt, look up a file in the basement, sometimes without signal.
• Rules that hold: a date cannot be in the past, an amount cannot be empty, a customer cannot exist twice.
• Sequences: the approved order creates the invoice, the unpaid invoice triggers the reminder. What you did by hand happens by itself.
• Connections to what you already use: accounting, calendar, email.

What to keep from the file

The file had one quality: its flexibility. You added a column in ten seconds. Good business software must not lose it: fields you can add, lists you can sort and filter your own way, and above all an export. Your data must be able to come out in one click, in an open format, at any time. A tool that holds your data hostage is not progress.

Start small: the first scope

The classic mistake is wanting to replace everything at once. The file does ten things; you ask for software that does ten, you wait a year, and on delivery day nothing matches any more. We do the opposite:

• Choose the part that hurts most: the one where mistakes cost money, or the one that blocks the field.
• Build it in a few weeks, put it in the hands of the people who use it, fix.
• Add the rest, piece by piece, keeping the file for the rest as long as it is useful.

The budget depends mostly on the number of business rules, not on the number of screens. We quote a first scope after the scoping.

Your data: in Switzerland, and yours

Business software contains your customers, your prices, your margins. Two questions to ask before signing: where is the data hosted, and who owns it? We host in Switzerland, under Swiss law and the Federal Act on Data Protection, and the code as well as the data remain yours. You can leave with everything, the day you decide to.

Conclusion

A file that grew with the business deserves respect, not nostalgia. When several people, the field and errors get involved, business software takes over: small at first, built around the way you work, and with your data at home.