5 Reasons Why You Should Upgrade From Excel
Microsoft Excel is a powerful multifunctional spreadsheet. You’ve probably heard how it works wonders for simple accounting with thousands of unique formulas. However, when it comes to solving your inventory management problems, the Excel spreadsheet falls short. Here are the reasons why they no longer work for your business.
1. Excel Tracks No Date!
Excel isn’t designed to store years of historical data. To make Excel more manageable, people often ‘update’ those spreadsheets to avoid keeping up with too many sheets all at once. So once you type in new numbers, you will simply lose all of yesterday’s essential data.
However, let’s say you have managed to keep up with Excel’s troublesome bookkeeping tabs, you might still lose a looooot of time tracking up information from the past. So why is historical data so important, you ask?
Historical data is essential to identify financial trends, such as forecasting your future sales and budgets. Without this critical information, businesses are oblivious to making mistakes in their financial planning. Also, it allows you to reflect on the past sales and diagnose any outages and hiccups for you to make prompt amendments accordingly. Simply, historical data leaves you ample room for improvements.
2. Lengthy Manual Processes
A daily sales report means daily entry. Can you believe that this delicate task can also be risky for your business? Here are the reasons why. Excel does not track your sales automatically, neither does it register them for you. So you’re going to need to spend extra workforce and time to enter those raw data into the spreadsheet.
Let’s get this straight - an extra workforce means labour cost, and additional labour cost means less profit.
Now is where it gets to the real problem. When data is registered manually, it is prone to human error. There are hundreds of daily sales updates and even thousands of complex Excel formulas, so it is understandable to make mistakes when formulating those data.
If you have dealt with spreadsheets before, you would know that a single error in a cell could mess up the whole formula. So, now you’re going to need MORE time to spend on looking & fixing that mistake. What a mess!
We understand that you need to cut unnecessary time spent on Excel and labour costs to grow your business. Let us help you! Food Market Hub allows you to automate your F&B business all in one place effortlessly. With an accurate auto-generated system, you can easily track back past data within the app at any time you like. No more human error!
3. No Integration Capability
With integrated software like Food Market Hub, you expect your data to be correctly organised - from forecasting your stock counts to managing your procurements and accounting at your fingertips electronically. Having the advantage of visibility to inventory counts, food waste, and Point of Sales indeed gives you more control over your business.
Unfortunately, an Excel spreadsheet does not help you tie this critical information together in one place. It lacks integration capabilities, and the process of acquiring data is made tedious. You need to move around checking receipts and data from other departments just to complete one sales report. Imagine how many screens you need to cross-check reports and data from multiple spreadsheets?! Well, Food Market Hub has an AI feature that helps you to make smarter decisions for your business! In case you'd like to know more about us, check us out here!
This process takes too much time and requires you to do extra work cross-checking data from one place to another. The labour does not end there, though; you’re going to organise and categorise those data in your business spreadsheet manually. How troublesome is that?
4. Excel lacks Scalability
Excel is an excellent platform for managing your business and strategies at the beginning of your journey. However, it is only ideal in a short period. As time goes on, you tend to add new products, services, hire more employees as you grow, and make other changes to your business. These changes will require you to update your Excel spreadsheet constantly, and finally, it comes to a time where these numbers will overwhelm you, and there will be too much data for one human to handle.
Microsoft Excel 2010 provides you with an astonishing number of 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns, including 255 sheets at your disposal. However, these unlimited capacities do not help with the scalability issue at all.
In simple terms, scalability is the ability for an application to become flexible to handle substantial growth and complex requirements. So, scalability here refers to Excel’s ability to handle ever-increasing volumes of data. The problem starts here: as the amount of data expands rapidly, you will encounter some performance issues. Your spreadsheet starts lagging and slowing down as you go.
Sure, you can work around the problem and start a new worksheet to minimise the issue. In a few years, there will be hundreds of confusing worksheets that will only cause you headaches.
5. Inaccurate Cash Flow Forecasting
Many businesses find it challenging to keep up with their financial cash flow management. You are earning profits from your sales, yet cash flow forecasting seems impossible to implement on Excel. Cash flow forecasting is one of the essential processes, especially when making decisions such as funding and investment.
For instance, a cash flow management software would effortlessly show the projected cash based on the income and expenses of your business. You can simply set the forecast to cover a short-term period with a minimum of 30 days.
However, Excel does not provide you with such software. Again, you will need to forecast your business cash flow manually, yet it is prone to errors from existing complex formulas and human mistakes.
Conclusion
In conclusion, you should save yourself a headache and move on from using Excel spreadsheets for your growing business. Instead, you should start investing in Food Market Hub’s advanced inventory and procurement management system and just focus on making profits every day!
