The spreadsheet trap: Software over spreadsheets

Okay. So you just got a new role managing IT at a small-to-medium size business. Congrats on the new role! Your first task is to audit the software being used by this 500-person, globally distributed company. But, how do you start? 

Your first thought is opening a spreadsheet and maybe throwing some scripts at it. And we’ll admit that in 2004, a spreadsheet might be a good tool for software management. 

But in 2024, they end up being more work than their worth. We don’t have a problem admitting that spreadsheets have their place in the tech stack. A spreadsheet is great for many things, but for SaaS Management, it is not. 

Our customers agree. Having a spreadsheet is only the first step. And often, those steps are skipped altogether – or just plain missed. 

A brief history of spreadsheets

Let’s go back for a second. Spreadsheets are pretty awesome, and if you’ve never had to use green ledger paper in a glue-bound book, you’re favored in time. LANPA and VisiCalc were the first electronic spreadsheets available. Electronic spreadsheets blew up with the rise of the personal computer. Every PC you got from Costco in the 1990s was loaded up with some type of basic office software. 

As a Gen X-er, I remember creating spreadsheets in Microsoft Works and coming to a job where they used Lotus 1-2-3. I even went to Frye’s Electronics to buy 4MG of RAM (at $100 ea) and installed it myself. Boy, did my PC run fast! 

Like most of Gen X, we were lucky to be born in the transition from typewriter to computer and ledger paper to spreadsheets. In fact, accounting programs like Quicken saved me from even learning double-entry accounting. Talk about extra work!

But now, it’s like everyone is using spreadsheets – even for blocks of text! Oh, the horrors.

Half of doing a job efficiently and effectively is choosing the right tool. The other half is using the tool correctly. I mean, if you really wanted to do arithmetic with an abacus you could, but why? 

Where spreadsheets excel

And then came Microsoft Word and then Excel. Microsoft Office was born and we all even played around with their database program, Access. Databases are great for storing data and recalling it, but that’s another blog post. 

Spreadsheets like Excel helped us to go beyond basic accounting to complex financial formulas and also to view it in a nice user interface instead of green text on a black screen. Spreadsheets allow you to easily sort, list, sum, and project. Huzzah! Finally, we had practical software to help us do our jobs. Open Office (OSS) came in to help with the cost of entry and Google Sheets (SaaS) solved the collaboration issue with these rows and columns of numbers. 

Everyone was coming up with “innovative” ways to use Excel. At my job in the early 2000s, we used Excel as a library checkout system for construction equipment. That was quite the chore! Speaking of chores, the last thing you’d ever want to do is use a spreadsheet to manage your SaaS applications. 

Why? Well, spreadsheets are good at listing, accounting, and sorting. And of course, all of those tasks like tracking licenses, projecting budgets, and sorting by expiration date can be useful. But then the question remains. How many spreadsheets are you going to manage in order to manage your SaaS stack?  

Spreadsheets are great at listing. 

• You do need to track licenses.
• You do need to track expiration dates.
• You do need to track users.
• You do need to track apps.
• You do need to track features.

Spreadsheets are great for accounting.

• Adding columns of numbers is easy with formulas.
• Projecting budgets is easy with formulas.
• Comparing the costs of licenses is easy with formulas.

Spreadsheets are great for sorting.

• Sorting rows of data by date is helpful.
• Sorting rows of data by number is helpful.
• Sorting rows of data by alphabet is helpful.

True SaaS Management is more complex than a series of lists or simple budget calculations. . 

In order to use spreadsheets for “SaaS management” you’d need a spreadsheet to keep track of your spreadsheets. And even then, you would lack real-time data like usage, employee sentiment, and spend tracking.

Spreadsheets fail at real-time usage tracking

The truth behind usage tracking is that it isn’t as simple as “how many people in accounting are using Xero?” 

It also means understanding which user needs which privileges. Everyone knows that Zoom is free for meetings under 40 minutes. So not everyone in your company needs that Pro Plan, right? Only the hosts do. This is where it’s important to consider the license types – most of them vary upon usage. 

Hitting that sweet spot would be difficult if you only had a spreadsheet. Imagine manually keeping track of Microsoft licenses. With BetterCloud, we have found that rightsizing Microsoft licenses can save a company an average of over $35,000 a year. Doing that without spending an inordinate amount of time (like by using a spreadsheet) is a huge win for IT and will surely be recognized by the C-Suite.

Spreadsheets fail at real-time employee sentiment

Before you can make SaaS audit recommendations, you need to understand what apps your employees are using and why. 

Maybe they are forced to use Adobe Cloud but are secretly using Canva (and expensing it). Sanctioned or not, two graphics programs are being used – we call that overlapping usage. Overlapping usage is a symptom of the issue: employees don’t like the software chosen for them.

Why? You don’t know if you don’t ask. It could be as simple as a program’s UX. Sales may be used to using Salesforce, for example, and Marketing prefers the modernity of HubSpot. If you don’t continuously take a pulse and poll your employees how will you know? Sentiment and usage go hand-in-hand – especially when managing SaaS spend.

Instead of talking to everyone one-by-one about what software is critical to them, using BetterCloud to track how people feel about it is a much faster way. Utilizing employee sentiment surveys, IT can view an employee sentiment grid and an NPS score for each software application. 

Removing the time it takes out of meeting directly with employees and turning sentiment into data allows IT to act in a data-driven capacity rather than guesswork and inefficient data tracking.

You need a dashboard to track employee sentiment, not a conflated spreadsheet.

Spreadsheets fail at real-time spend tracking

Keeping a spreadsheet up to date is a constant uphill battle, tracking known expenses is one thing, but factoring in shadow IT and software overlap makes spreadsheets completely unusable for software license management.

We know the struggle, which is why BetterCloud was created so IT has a better way to track software budgets in tandem with key SaaS management features like automation and file security. As an all-in-one platform, IT can rest easy knowing they have a single pane of glass into their tech stack.

Even better than managing and tracking spend, you need real-time insights and benchmark data to empower those license renewal negotiations in your favor. Work smarter, not harder.

Bonus: Spreadsheets fail at triggering automation

Spreadsheets just add and list things. They don’t actually do the work. Sure, with an advanced spreadsheet, you might have the chops to create scripts that would trigger automation based upon employee emails being deactivated, or printing reports of licenses that are expired. But you want more than just a list that you still have to take action upon. 

You need it done. You don’t need a list. 

License reclamation is important for managing your SaaS budget, sure, but it’s also a big part of IT’s to-do list. Identifying licenses that can be reclaimed is just step one. Actually reclaiming them is a whole other set of tasks. 

In our Microsoft example, we would want to see who is inactive, deactivate their license, and even downgrade their licenses. The same goes for Zoom users. If they’re not meeting hosts, their licenses should be automatically downgraded.

With BetterCloud, this is done automagically. So that you can work on strategic initiatives instead of redundant, repetitive, mundane tasks. Doesn’t that sound like a dream?

You automate everything else, Why not SaaS management, too?

BetterCloud is so much more than just onboarding and offboarding users. It automates file security, license reclamation, spend management, application access, and more! Ditch the spreadsheet and eliminate thousands of hours of manual IT work and thousands of dollars in wasted software expenses with BetterCloud.

Be an IT Hero!