We recently spoke with a company from the established order: tens of millions in revenue, a site in China and one in the Netherlands, supplying large retailers. And still, almost everything ran on Excel, Google Sheets and loose tools. No exception, it turns out in practice. The key lesson up front: an unfinished ERP is not a matter of company size, but of a moment that has not yet arrived. This is when spreadsheets start to slow you down, what they silently cost, and what the move to Odoo looks like.
It is not a size problem
There is a stubborn image that “still running on Excel” is something for startups and small business owners. Reality is different. We regularly see mature, profitable companies with tens of millions in revenue, multiple sites and international customers, where the core of the operation still sits in spreadsheets: the stock, the orders, the purchasing, the price calculation, the communication with suppliers and customers.
That is not a sign of amateurism. It is almost always the result of success. The company grew with what worked, and Excel worked. Why would you change something that brought revenue to tens of millions? That exact reasoning is why the switch is postponed for so long - until a moment forces it.
Why Excel lasts so long
Excel is not dominant by accident. It is the most flexible piece of software most people know: it works from the first second, costs nothing extra, requires no implementation, and adapts to any process you can think of. You start with a tab. Then a second file is added. Then a shared folder, a naming convention, a macro someone once built.
That is how a company grows into it unnoticed; every step is small and logical; nobody ever consciously decides “we run our business on spreadsheets”. It just happens. And because it scales along - slower than the business, but it scales - the tipping point only comes into view late.
The Excel paradox
Here is the crux. The very property that makes Excel so attractive is exactly where it eventually slows you down: the boundless flexibility. Because anything is possible, nothing is fixed. There is no enforced process, no single source of truth, no built-in control. Two people edit two versions; a formula gets overwritten by accident; a file lives in the head of whoever built it.
At small scale that is manageable. At scale it becomes a risk. The flexibility that moved you forward is then the reason nobody can say with certainty how much stock there is or what an order really earns.
The signals that Excel has become the brake
The tipping point announces itself. The recurring signals, and why they occur:
- Stock never quite matches. You buy or sell in multiple places, and each list keeps its own count. Without a central source it inevitably drifts apart.
- Someone retypes data by hand. Between purchasing and sales, between order and accounting. Every manual step is slow, error-prone, and does not scale with your volume.
- The overview sits in one head. There is a colleague who “knows the sheets”. If they leave, the insight leaves. That is key-person risk, not a system.
- Reporting takes days. A simple question - what margin did we make per customer last quarter - requires manually combining multiple files.
- Onboarding new people fails. There is no system to learn, only unwritten knowledge and files with their own logic.
What Excel silently costs at scale
The licence is free; the cost of ownership is not. The real costs are invisible and therefore treacherous:
- Errors from double entry that only surface when a customer or supplier complains.
- Stock that does not match, causing missed sales, overselling or over-buying.
- Margin you only see afterwards, because costs and sales sit in separate files.
- Hours of manual work that grow linearly with your order volume instead of being automated.
- No audit trail, which becomes awkward once compliance, an audit or a large customer asks for proof.
A spreadsheet that demands tens of hours of correction and reconciliation every month is more expensive than a system that simply works. That is the same calculation we make in what an Odoo implementation costs: the visible price is rarely the whole story.
The tipping point is almost never “it could be better”
This is perhaps the most important insight, and it recurs in our analysis of 300+ ERP switchers: companies rarely switch because it could be better. “It could be better” is a nagging feeling that can linger for years. Only a concrete moment gets people moving:
- A large customer demanding EDI or a customer portal, which a spreadsheet simply cannot deliver.
- A second site, currency or language being added.
- A team that grows and in which the knowledge no longer fits in a few heads.
- Local custom software that was once built and no longer keeps up with the growth.
Recognise such a moment, and the question is no longer “could it be better”, but “can we still do this with Excel”. That is the point at which postponing costs more than switching.
The pressure from large customers
A separate, underrated trigger: your customers force your hand. Large retailers do not work with loose order lists by email. They expect EDI connections, order statuses, a supplier portal, clean article data. Whoever tries to meet that with Excel gets stuck - not because the people cannot do it, but because a spreadsheet is never a system that talks to another system automatically.
At that moment the choice is no longer internal. You have to keep up with what your customers expect, and that requires a business platform with a real source of truth behind your sales.
International makes it sharper
As soon as a company combines multiple countries - for example a purchasing organisation in China and a sales side in the Netherlands - complexity stacks up: multiple currencies, multiple languages, a foreign bookkeeping that is arranged locally but still has to connect, and logistics across borders. Excel can keep up for a while, but it becomes a house of cards. That is precisely where a platform like Odoo delivers a big advantage: multiple entities, currencies and languages in a coherent whole, with the local accounting connected instead of loose. We wrote earlier about Odoo for international rollouts.
What “off Excel” really means
Switching is not the same as digitising your spreadsheets. It is about a fundamental shift: from loose lists to a source of truth. In a system like Odoo, purchasing, sales, stock, order workflow, article management, EDI, customer portal and accounting come together on one data model. A sale automatically lowers the stock; a purchase replenishes it; the accounting follows along; and everyone looks at the same figures.
That is the gain Excel by definition cannot offer, however clever your sheets are: coherence. No longer five files you try to keep aligned by hand, but a whole that adds up because it cannot do otherwise.
When Excel is fine (the honest nuance)
To stay honest: Excel is not the problem, and not every company has to move off it. For a single location with clear processes, few movements and a small team, a well-built spreadsheet is often fine - and an ERP project would be overkill then. The point is not “Excel is bad”. The point is recognising the moment when your operations have grown bigger than a spreadsheet can carry.
How to approach the switch
The order that makes the difference between a smooth transition and a painful one:
- Fit-gap first. Map your processes, channels, stock flows and accounting requirements before you configure anything. Where is the real pain, and what can run standard?
- Decide which data becomes leading. Stock, articles, customers: one source, not five.
- Phase the rollout. Start with the core (purchasing, sales, stock) and expand, instead of switching everything on at once.
- Migrate cleanly. Move articles, open items and balances over correctly, with a dry run before go-live.
- Keep Excel for what it is good at. Ad-hoc analysis and quick calculations stay fine in Excel; the operation moves.
That is exactly the kind of choice where an honest analysis up front makes the difference between a system that lasts for years and a half-finished project.
In short
Still running on Excel is not a sign of a small or immature company - it is often precisely the result of success and postponed necessity. Excel lasts a long time because it scales deceptively well, but the same flexibility is where you eventually get stuck. The tipping point is almost never “it could be better”, but a concrete moment: a large customer, a second site, a growing team. Recognise that moment, and move your operations to a source of truth - then Excel goes back to being the tool it should be.
Recognise this, and unsure whether your moment has arrived? Schedule a no-obligation Quickscan and we will map your processes, your scope and your biggest risks in 20 minutes - including an honest answer on whether Excel is still enough for now.
Read more: Why companies really switch ERP: 300+ switchers · What does an Odoo implementation cost? · Odoo for international rollouts · Odoo reviews: 2,500+ reviews · All ERP comparisons