Small Businesses are Sick of Spreadsheets

When Lotus 1-2-3 came out on January 26, 1983, it was one of the first spreadsheet’s to become hugely popular because of the great productivity gains businesses obtained from it.

Now spreadsheets have become a staple of everyday business life (with Microsoft Excel as the dominant spreadsheet), but more and more companies are discovering that in order to really see how their business is performing in a timely fashion, spreadsheets are a real pain.

That’s what I’ve been discovering over the last few months as I embarked on a quest to find out, from our customers’ mouths, what was it  that really made them decide to become customers of KPI Online.

I interviewed dozens of our customers, mostly small and mid-sized businesses with at least $5 million in annual revenues, and asked various questions such as:

1. Why did you choose KPI Online?
2. Were you looking for a Business Intelligence tool?
3. What have been the biggest benefits of using KPI Online?

First, we discovered that NOBODY (with one exception) was actually looking for a Business Intelligence tool. They were looking for better reporting, or a way to make sense out of the data that was locked away in their accounting or ERP systems.

Second, we discovered that once they started using KPI Online’s dashboards and reports, they realized how much time they wasted spending time creating reports and dashboards using spreadsheets.

Some of the key customer quotes we recorded:

“It took me about 2 weeks to create the reports I needed for my quarterly management reviews.”

“In one hour I could create only 3 reports in Excel, but I could create 50 reports using KPI Online.”

“Before the reports I created in Excel where done with data after we closed the books on the quarter. Today with KPI Online’s real-time integration to our ERP s ystem, I can see real-time reports instead of having to wait until after every quarter.”

You can see some of the clients themselves talking about spreadsheets, on this video and this video.

QuickBooks Users are Sick of Spreadsheets Too

I just came back from a QuickBooks event in Houston last week. I found the same story there. Most QuickBooks users use Excel to create reports they can’t get from the reports available in the program, but it takes them a really long time to get the reports they really need, and then they have to email the report to different people for their input, and then they don’t know if the people they emailed the spreadsheets too “manipulated” the data in some way to suit their purposes.

It was with this in mind that we decided to launch a little contest

What’s your Biggest Spreadsheet Reporting Nightmare?

We decided to launch a contest. with Apple’s new iPad as the winning prize. The contest? Tell us your biggest reporting nightmare using spreadsheets. Tell us how long ti took, why it took so long, what was involved, and what you’d like to see as a solution instead.

We”re doing the drawing to find the winner June 1st. We hope to film the drawing live using Ustream. Stay tuned for more information on where and how to tune in.

We’re also going to use some of the entries in a future blog post, a part 2 if you will, on why spreadsheets have become the bane of existence for companies wanting to get more out of their data than spreadsheet reports can provide.

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