How Spreadsheets Are Holding Small Businesses Back | Certn

Spreadsheets are a simple and popular way for businesses to consolidate and manage large amounts of employee and candidate data. However, they also have shortcomings in their efficiency, security, and operations. This post explains how spreadsheets prevent small business teams from meeting their goals effectively and discuss the alternative: recruitment software.

Why Do Small Businesses Depend on Spreadsheets?

HR personnel rely heavily on spreadsheets to store and manage candidates’ information. For small organizations, spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel are a simple, affordable option and a logical upgrade to paper records. They don’t require complex technical skills—anyone with basic computer knowledge can manage spreadsheets.

Why Do HR Managers of Small Businesses Love Spreadsheets?

Small businesses and startups can benefit (for a while) from using spreadsheets. Some of the main advantages and reasons why small businesses use spreadsheets include:

• They have helpful built-in formulas
  HR personnel use the built-in formulas to compute employees’ salaries and paid time off as well as to filter and organize employee information. Popular functions include SUMIF, VLOOKUP, TODAY, COUNTIF, formatting, and pivot tables.

• They’re cost-effective
  Because spreadsheets come built-in to the standard Microsoft Office package, they are a relatively inexpensive way to manage employee information. Small businesses often start by using spreadsheet templates and customizing them further.

• They’re accessible
  As we said above, since Excel comes with Office, it’s easily accessible and people tend to be more familiar with it than they would be with recruitment software. Also, employees can acquire more advanced skills by watching free tutorials, saving time and expense on training.

• They integrate easily into the workflow
  Small businesses that rely on Office or Google Sheets can easily integrate their spreadsheets into the rest of the workflow.

• They make it easy to manipulate and analyze data
  Even beginners can use spreadsheets with little supervision, so they’re popular with HR managers. It’s easy to create a spreadsheet to track and assess almost any kind of information.

Why Spreadsheets Are Not Enough for Businesses to Manage Employee Data

While spreadsheets can be helpful, they have definite limitations too. As an organization grows and introduces new complexities, spreadsheets become less effective—and more tiring and time-consuming. Here are ten disadvantages of using spreadsheets for recruiting:

1. Spreadsheets Are Time-Consuming– Maintaining a spreadsheet can take an enormous amount of time. HR people often need to input the same data multiple times manually or go through filters to find a piece of information.
2. Formulas and Data Can Be Corrupted – Spreadsheets are typically updated by several different employees and are constantly being reviewed and revised.
3. Slow Insights Impair Decision Making – Because of the tedious nature of analyzing data in a spreadsheet, creating reports takes a lot of work.
4. Data in Spreadsheets Is Hard to Protect – While spreadsheets can be password protected, this does little good when everybody on the team needs access.
5. Spreadsheets Are Difficult to Update – If inputting new data into a spreadsheet is time-consuming, updating it is doubly so.
6. Spreadsheets Are Not Flex-Work Friendly – Accessing the spreadsheets needed for each HR process can be challenging for remote and flex workers.
7. They Don’t Reduce Paperwork– HR employees still need to manually update the employee contact information.
8. Data Is too Spread Out – Typically, an organization will have a spreadsheet for holidays, another for absences, etc.
9. Spreadsheets Are Vulnerable to Human Error – A typical spreadsheet is accessed and managed by several people, increasing the risk of mistakes.
10. Spreadsheets Don’t Produce Real-Time Information – There is no access to information in real time due to the difficulty of updating information in spreadsheets.

Why Small and Medium Businesses Need Recruitment Software

Human resources management systems help with employee management from recruitment to payroll. The software keeps employees’ information updated and automates time-consuming tasks.

How Modern Software Helps Small Businesses Cope Without a Formal Recruitment Team

One of the HR processes most affected by the spreadsheet’s shortcomings is recruitment and hiring—but recruitment software solves most of these challenges. It eliminates human error, produces real-time information, is secure, and cannot easily be corrupted.

Written by:

Dean Matthews, CEO, OnTheClock

Dean Mathews is the founder and CEO of OnTheClock, an employee time tracking app that helps over 15,000 companies all around the world track time.