When in-house IT outgrows the spreadsheet

Every IT team starts with spreadsheets. The question is when the spreadsheets stop scaling and what to move to.

The signals

• Two people discover, independently, that they fixed the same problem twice.
• The asset list and the actual assets disagree by more than 10 percent.
• You cannot tell which licenses are about to expire without a manual sweep.
• A new hire takes more than a day to figure out the lay of the land.
• Audit prep takes weeks instead of days.

What to move to

Not the most expensive option. The right move is usually a combination of three modest tools: a documentation platform with search, a ticketing system with categories that match how you actually work, and an asset tracker that lives close to one of the first two.

What to keep in spreadsheets

Quarterly planning. Cost analysis. Anything you are exploring before committing to a process. Spreadsheets remain great at the kinds of work where flexibility matters more than discipline.