7 Pitfalls of using EXCEL sheets to manage your fleet
Summary
Excel sheets have limitations in fleet management due to isolation, offline work, limited collaboration, inability to handle huge amounts of data, vulnerability to errors, incompatibility with mobile devices and smartwatches, difficulty in maintaining macros, cost, and the availability of better options. Fleet management requires real-time, connected data that can be collaboratively analyzed and acted upon.
Excel sheets cannot provide these capabilities, making it essential to adopt specialized fleet management software such as FleetOS.
Excel spreadsheets are the best way to record, organize, and visualize data. It has some great sophisticated functions like VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, etc, indeed basic functions yet highly useful functions like count, sum, average, etc. But all good inventions reach their limitations in age.
The greatest thing about fleet management technology is dealing with data; as a company, we create a lot. Many companies resulted in Billion-Dollar losses due to fake manipulations over excel sheets. The main reason behind spreadsheet vulnerability is the lack of protection, which makes it easy to alter formulas, values, or dependencies anonymously.
One of the major drawbacks of using a separate excel desktop application is, you can not handle or access a huge amount of data within a time or there are chances to lose the data. Sharing the data from an excel sheet to fleet management software may not be easy when you do it manually.
Let’s see some of the pitfalls of using excel sheets to manage your fleet in detail.
1. Isolated, offline, and collaboration
In the era of the connected world, excel sheets stay unconnected with other applications. Sharing and collaboration of excel sheets may not be easy. For instance data from GPS tracking devices, Freight providers, Vehicle Maintenance service providers cannot be fed into XL sheets automatically.
Difficulty in feeding inputs by multiple parties, centralized control, complicated formulas (macros), difficulty in sharing, Since excel sheets do not allow us to attach files to them, we need to use a separate document management system or folders for various files, it becomes difficult to use.
While coming to collaboration; Planning, analyzing, budgeting, and reporting all are collaborative activities, and excel spreadsheets are not designed for collaborative work. At a time, only one person can read or write the data. In some cases, the user needs to take and send a copy of the spreadsheet after every single edit, recipients even end up sending the wrong version which can lead to errors in data.
2. Explosion of data and granularity
The explosion of data and granularity increases day-by-day. Granularity is the level of data detail, when the same data are represented in the sheets multiple times, the granularity may differ.
Today we are handling more than 10 to 100 times of data compared with the year 2000. you can not handle or access a huge amount of data within a period or there are chances to lose the data. Excel sheets are mainly known for the slow consolidation process.
An organization keeps on growing, data keeps on increasing. Managing a huge amount of data is impossible in a spreadsheet, even deriving accurate results from that huge amount of data is extremely tough.
Sharing and using the data from an excel sheet to fleet management software may not be easy when you do it manually. The data we tend to ignore earlier due to density has become important today.
3. Decision making 24/7
Data plays a major role in decision making. With so much data to handle, the expectation of results, is it possible to make a precise decision using spreadsheets?
The devil lies in the detail. Extracting data from separate places, analyzing them, and summarising the information can be very time-consuming. We know about excel sheets vulnerability. Hence, double-checking the decisions would be better. Missing one input in decision making will shove off the entire profit or it can lead to big losses.
According to a study from the University of Hawaii, 88% of spreadsheets contain some type of error.
Hoping for accuracy, say no to spreadsheets.
4. Not mobile-friendly, impossible in smartwatch
Using Excel sheets on a mobile phone is a challenging task. Spreadsheets are not natively compatible with smartphones. Using spreadsheets on your mobile phone may tend to get slow, even the desktop which uses an excel sheet with a huge amount of data will also get stuck in between and it makes the process slow. Obviously, it will never fit in smartwatches.
Using mobile phones for some sales services became part of the company, often dragging out a laptop each time you need to enter or change customer data is hard.
5. Excel Macros tough to maintain
Excel macros save you from headaches by automating common, repetitive tasks in excel sheets. There are many good reasons to avoid macros in your excel sheets.
writing, debugging, and running macro code may take your time longer than using worksheet features. You’ll struggle to understand your code to revisit it weeks or months later. If any code goes wrong; the whole data in the sheet will be collapsed. Like this, we can keep on many reasons to avoid macros in excel sheet.
In this era of “zero-code,” nobody likes to waste time by following an old practice in an organization. Absolutely usage of spreadsheets is not advisable for growing organizations.
6. It's not free!
Spreadsheets are part of the pure modern business world. If you are spending a penny it should be worth the while, Do you think spreadsheets are worth the penny? We will leave this up to you. Nothing comes for free. One has to pay for google once they reach the size limit.
7. You got better options.
Spreadsheets are not obsolete, but for fleet management? Do you think spreadsheets are okay for fleet management? We as a company will say no to spreadsheets in fleet management.
You have a lot of better options on the market, but FleetOS is a choice, not an option. Migrate your fleet management data from excel sheets to the art of fleet management application. Get your free account today! Login to vamosys.com.
FleetOS provides you the best platform to migrate your complete fleet data excel sheets into FleetOS software. Where you can access the data easily within the time and there will be no chances of losing the data.
As technology advances, we have the opportunity to analyze data that allows you to make better business decisions that take your company in a more efficient way of doing things.
