5 signs your spreadsheet should become a simple app

The five warning signs

1. Only one person really understands it. If they're ill, on holiday or step down, the bookings, rota or accounts stall.
2. Two people edited it at once and something got lost. Or someone sorted one column and not the others, and nobody noticed for a week.
3. You copy the same information into emails every week. Confirmations, reminders, rota lists. The data is already there; you're just retyping it.
4. People ask you things the spreadsheet already knows. "Is the hall free on the 14th?" "Am I on this Saturday?" Every question is a message you have to answer.
5. Monthly reports take an afternoon. Filtering, copying into a new tab, fixing formulas that broke since last time.

One of these is normal. Two or more usually means the spreadsheet is costing you more time than it saves.

Before you change anything: fix the easy bits

Some problems have quick fixes inside the tools you already use:

• Keep one shared copy online, not versions attached to emails.
• Learn where version history is. Google Sheets and OneDrive both let you see earlier versions and restore one if something gets overwritten.
• Lock the columns people shouldn't change, and use drop-down lists for things like status or room names.
• Write a one-page "how this works" note so it isn't all in one person's head.

If those fixes solve it, stop there.

Write down what you repeat

If the warning signs are still there, the next step is not choosing software. It's writing down the steps you repeat every week, in plain words. For example:

1. Someone emails asking for a date.
2. I check the spreadsheet.
3. I reply with the price and ask for a deposit.
4. When the deposit arrives, I mark it paid and send the hiring agreement.
5. Two days before, I send the key-safe code.

That list is your specification. Any tool you consider, ready-made or built, should handle each step. Anything it can't do, you'll keep doing by hand.

A worked example

This is an illustrative example. A volunteer co-ordinator spends about 20 minutes a week sending rota reminders, 30 minutes answering "am I on?" messages, and 3 hours at the end of each month on a report for trustees.

That's roughly 50 minutes a week plus 3 hours a month, or around 80 hours a year. If a tool that lets volunteers see their own shifts and sends reminders automatically removes even half of that, it saves around 40 hours a year of someone's time.

Putting a number on it helps you judge whether a monthly subscription, or a one-off build, is worth it.

Ready-made or built for you?

Often a ready-made tool, set up well, is enough. Bookings, rotas and simple forms are common problems with plenty of good products. A small custom tool makes more sense when your steps are unusual, when you'd need several products glued together, or when you want everything in one place under your own name.

Whichever way you go, keep your data exportable and make sure more than one person has access.

If you'd like to see what a simple rota tool can look like, our sample apps use made-up data you can click around freely.

Sources

• Google Docs Editors Help: find what's changed in a file
• Microsoft Support: restore a previous version of a file in OneDrive

Related

• See our sample apps
• App cost calculator
• Apps for charities

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