Almost every custom software project we've worked on started life as a spreadsheet. That isn't a criticism: spreadsheets are brilliant. They're flexible, everyone can use them, and they cost nothing.
The trouble is that they don't tell you when you've outgrown them. Here's how to tell, and what to do next.
Signs you've outgrown the spreadsheet
- More than one person edits it at once, and you've lost data to someone saving over someone else.
- There's a "master" version, and several copies that aren't.
- Only one person really understands it. When they're on leave, things wait.
- You re-type data from it into another system, such as invoicing, scheduling or a CRM.
- Customers or suppliers need to see part of it, so you export, email and hope it's current.
- It has a tab called "DO NOT TOUCH".
Two or three of these is normal. Five or more, and the spreadsheet is costing you more than it saves.
Option one: off-the-shelf software
For most common problems (accounting, rostering, job management, bookings, CRM) there's a SaaS tool built by a team of fifty people that will do it better than anything you could commission.
Choose off-the-shelf when:
- your process is broadly the same as everyone else's in your industry
- you're happy to adjust slightly to fit the tool
- the per-user price makes sense at your size, now and in three years.
The hidden costs are subscription creep, paying for features you don't use, and the work of connecting it to everything else. Budget for setup and integration, not just the monthly fee.
Option two: connect what you have
Often the answer isn't a new system but a link between existing ones: your form talks to your CRM, your CRM talks to your accounts, and nobody re-types anything.
This is usually the cheapest meaningful improvement, often a few thousand dollars, and it's worth trying before anything bigger.
Option three: custom software
Custom software makes sense when the way you work is the advantage, and squeezing it into someone else's product would blunt it. Common examples:
- a portal where your trade customers order, see their own pricing and reorder in two clicks
- an internal tool that matches your quoting or scheduling rules exactly
- a product you want to sell to others in your industry.
Custom is the cheaper option when you'd otherwise pay for several SaaS tools plus the glue between them, per user, forever, and still not get the workflow you need.
What it costs
A small internal tool typically starts around A$10,000. Client portals and SaaS MVPs run from about A$30,000 to A$120,000, depending on how many types of user, integrations and edge cases there are.
The most useful thing you can spend first is a short discovery sprint: a couple of weeks to map the process, prototype the core screens and price the build in milestones. It turns "how long is a piece of string?" into a number you can plan around.
Questions to ask any developer
- Who owns the code, and where does it live from day one?
- What does each milestone deliver that we can actually use?
- What happens if you're unavailable for a month?
- How will another developer pick this up later?
If the answers are vague, keep looking.
If you're weighing up a build, tell us what the spreadsheet does today. We'll tell you which of the three options we'd choose.