Blog · 2026-08-16
What spreadsheets actually cost a small manufacturer
Not the licence fee — the hours, the retyping and the wrong numbers. What running a workshop on spreadsheets costs, counted rather than guessed.
Ask a workshop what their spreadsheets cost and the answer is nothing. The program came with the computer.
That is true of the licence. It is not true of the spreadsheet.
What follows is not an argument against spreadsheets. It is a way to put a number on what one actually costs you, using your own figures rather than somebody else's.
## The licence is the only part that is free
Everything else is paid in hours, in corrections, and in the fact that one person cannot go on holiday. Those costs are real, they recur every month, and nobody puts them in a column — which is exactly why they are easy to carry for years without noticing.
## Cost one · the same order, typed three times
Take one order. Count how many times its details are typed by a human before the customer is invoiced: into a tracking sheet, onto a production sheet, into the accounting program. In most workshops the answer is three.
Now do the arithmetic with your own numbers. Three retypings, four minutes each, is twelve minutes an order. At thirty orders a month that is six hours. At a hundred, twenty.
Nobody schedules those hours. They happen in pieces of four minutes, between other things, and they never appear anywhere as a cost.
## Cost two · the wrong number that keeps travelling
A typed number can be wrong. That is not carelessness — it is what typing is.
The expensive part is not the mistake. It is that a spreadsheet has no way of noticing. The wrong dimension goes onto the production sheet, gets cut, gets loaded, and is discovered by the customer. By then the cost is not four minutes; it is a remake and a phone call you did not want to make.
One number a month reaching a customer wrong is enough to outweigh everything else on this list.
## Cost three · a spreadsheet has no memory
When you change a cell, the old value is gone. There is no record of what it was, who changed it, or why.
Most of the time that does not matter. It matters on the day somebody asks why the stock figure says forty when the shelf holds thirty-one, or why an order was priced at one figure in March and another in April. Then the answer has to be reconstructed from memory and email, and reconstruction takes an afternoon.
## Cost four · one person holds the file
Every workshop that runs on spreadsheets has one person who understands the workbook. They built it, they know which tab is current, they know which formula is broken and worked around.
That is a cost you only feel twice: when they are on holiday, and when they leave. Both are survivable and both are expensive, and neither is on any invoice.
## Cost five · the month that has to be rebuilt
At month end somebody adds up what was sold, what was made, and what is left. If the data lived in one place this would be a query. Because it lives in four files that mostly agree, it is an evening — and it is the same evening every month, for as long as the workshop exists.
## What spreadsheets are genuinely good for
They are the best thinking tool there is. Trying a price, sketching a plan, working out whether an idea holds — nothing beats a blank grid, and no software should replace it.
The trouble starts when a thinking tool quietly becomes a system of record: when the spreadsheet stops being where you work something out and becomes where the truth is kept. Grids are excellent at the first and structurally bad at the second, because a system of record needs history, rules and one version — and a spreadsheet has none of the three by design.
## Put your own number on it
Three questions, and you can answer all of them this week without buying anything:
How many times does one order get typed by a person before it is invoiced, and by whom.
How many hours went into last month's month end, from first file to final figure.
How many times in the past year did a wrong number reach a customer, and what did each one cost to put right.
Multiply the first by your order volume, add the second twelve times, add the third honestly. That figure is what your spreadsheets cost — and it is the only figure worth comparing any software against.
## And then the real question
If the number is small, keep the spreadsheets. That is a legitimate answer and it is often the right one.
If it is not small, the useful question is not which program to buy. It is which of those five costs you actually want to remove — because they are not removed by the same thing, and a system that removes one while adding two is worse than the grid you started with.
Tell us where the hours go in your works, and we will say honestly whether it is worth building.