Are you managing critical business workflows on a tool designed for accounting? It’s time to move beyond the "Master Google Sheet" and build an intake process that actually works.
It usually starts innocently enough.
A new department is formed, or a new service is launched, and someone says, "We need a way for people to submit requests." In a fast-paced corporate environment, the quickest solution wins: someone spins up a Google Sheet or Smartsheet, adds twenty columns for required information, creates a form view, and emails the link to the entire company.
Problem solved, right?
For the first month, maybe. But fast-forward six months. That "quick fix" spreadsheet now has 3,000 rows and has metastasized into 115 columns of information. It crashes browsers. No one knows who owns which cell. And the team managing it spends 40% of their day just trying to keep the data clean.
If this sounds familiar, your organization has fallen into the "Spreadsheet Trap."
As a consultant who has worked inside major enterprises, I’ve seen firsthand how relying on spreadsheets for complex intake processes creates hidden costs, operational friction, and data nightmares.
Here is why the spreadsheet approach is failing your team, and why it’s time for a structural change.
Spreadsheets are incredible tools for financial modeling and ad-hoc lists. They are terrible tools for process management and relational data.
When you force complex workflows into a flat spreadsheet, you encounter three unavoidable problems:
Think about the person submitting a request. They are presented with a daunting form asking for endless details. Once they hit "Submit," their request vanishes into a void.
Because spreadsheets are static, the submitter has no way to log back in to edit a typo, add a crucial attachment they forgot, or check real-time status. This leads to the inevitable barrage of "Any update on this?" emails and Slack messages that distract your team from actually doing the work.
This is the silent killer of productivity. In a spreadsheet, data is "denormalized" or "flat."
To track a project, you might have to repeat the requester’s department, the budget code, and the vendor name in every single row that relates to that project. If one of those details changes, you have to find-and-replace across hundreds of rows.
When leadership asks for a report on intake volume by department or average turnaround time, you can’t give them a straight answer. You have to export the data to CSV, wrestle with it in pivot tables, and manually clean up inconsistencies. You can't build reliable, real-time dashboards on broken data structures.
A spreadsheet cell doesn't know the difference between "To Do" and "Done." It can’t automatically notify the next person in the chain when a status changes. It can’t enforce required fields based on previous answers (conditional logic).
Instead, your highly paid staff members are acting as human automation routers, manually emailing people to tell them it’s their turn to look at the sheet.
Moving away from spreadsheets isn’t just about buying a license for Airtable, Jira, or Monday.com. It’s about fundamentally rethinking your data architecture.
Organizations often struggle to make this transition internally because they are too busy bailing water out of their sinking spreadsheet boat to fix the leak.
This is where my consulting practice comes in.
I help organizations transition from fragile spreadsheet intake processes to robust, relational, and automated workflows. My approach focuses on three key phases:
The Audit: We stop looking at the spreadsheet as a "list" and start mapping the actual lifecycle of a request. Where are the bottlenecks? What data is being duplicated?
The Relational Design: I restructure your data into normalized tables—separating requesters, projects, and tasks—so that your data becomes a single source of truth that is easy to report on.
The Human Interface: We build a modern portal where submitters have bi-directional access—they can see their status in real-time and update their own requests, drastically reducing friction.
If your team is spending more time managing the tool than managing the actual work, it’s time for a change. Don't let another quarter go by with critical data trapped in a 100-column spreadsheet.
Let's discuss how we can modernize your intake process to improve ROI, recover lost time, and finally get the reporting visibility you need.