Five spreadsheets, one customer, five versions of the truth

TradeyHub ran on five spreadsheets. Customers in one, jobs in another, quotes in a third, scheduling in a fourth, and something approximating accounts in the fifth. Each had been built to solve a real problem at a real moment, and each did its job well.

The problem was never the spreadsheets. It was that the same customer existed in all five, in five slightly different forms, and every change had to be made in each one, or, realistically, in the two or three somebody remembered on the day.

When we mapped the work before building anything, the expensive duplication turned out not to be where anyone expected. The customer record was annoying but quick. The costly one was the job detail: typed into a quote, then typed again into an invoice, on every job, forever.

That is the pattern in nearly every business we audit. The duplication people complain about is not the duplication that costs the most, because the irritating one is visible and the expensive one has become invisible through repetition.

We built a single platform holding customers, jobs, quotes and scheduling, with one record for each, delivered in stages so the quote-to-invoice link, the largest saving and the lowest risk, landed first and was in daily use while the rest was still being built.

The general lesson is worth more than the specific system: before deciding what to build, follow one job from enquiry to payment and write down every point where information already in the business gets typed in again. It takes an afternoon and it usually surprises the person who runs the place.

There is a second lesson in it about sequencing. The instinct with a project like this is to build the whole thing and launch it, because a half-finished system feels unsatisfying. In practice, delivering the single highest-saving piece first, in this case the quote-to-invoice link, means the business is getting value in week four rather than month five, and it means the rest of the build happens with real feedback from people using it daily.

It also de-risks the project considerably. If something is going to be wrong about the design, it surfaces while one part is live rather than at the end when everything arrives at once.

If you recognise the five-spreadsheets pattern in your own business, the useful first step costs nothing: follow one job from enquiry to payment and write down every point where information already in the business gets typed in again. It takes an afternoon, and the list is usually longer and more expensive than the person running the place expects.

• Tradeyhub
• Custom Software, Booking, job management, quoting and invoicing systems that replace the spreadsheets. Free review, fixed quote.