Comparison7 June 20234 min read
Nearly every bookkeeping practice started with Excel, and for good reason. A spreadsheet is free, immediately available and has no learning curve. For recording a client list with its deadlines, it is a perfectly good instrument.
It only starts to pinch once the spreadsheet does something other than record: once it has to carry the whole firm's planning. At that point a file is expected to serve several people at the same time, to remember what happened last period and to show what is still open. That is not what a spreadsheet was built for.
To keep the comparison fair, there are things a spreadsheet is hard to beat at.
Those three properties explain why a planning starts in Excel. They also explain why it is hard to stop.
There is never one version. As soon as the file is shared, emailed or opened locally, variants appear. The question "which one is the latest?" is the first symptom.
Changes leave no trace. A status that was adjusted, a deadline that moved, a name that was replaced: afterwards there is no way to tell who did what, when, or why.
Ticks do not mean the same thing to everyone. In one column "done" means processed, in another it means filed. What is genuinely still open costs a walk past colleagues.
Repetition is manual. Copying again every period, clearing columns and checking the client list. That is the work with the lowest return and the highest frequency.
Permissions do not exist. Anyone who can open the file can see everything and change everything — including by accident.
In a spreadsheet, a quarterly round is a tab rebuilt every quarter. In Offsoo it is an activity that recurs per client at a frequency: monthly, quarterly, four-weekly, half-yearly, annually or a self-chosen set of months. It appears in the right period by itself, with the assignee, the planned hours and the checklist of steps already attached.
A coloured cell is an agreement between colleagues. A status in the planning is a property of the work: freely configurable per firm, identical for everyone, and filterable. What is still open in the final week is then a filter rather than an inventory.
In Excel, planned hours and recorded hours live in separate files, if they exist at all. In Offsoo they hang off the same activity, which makes it visible per client what the work cost against what was set for it. That is the basis for both capacity planning and pricing.
Addresses, contacts and KVK details in a spreadsheet start ageing the moment they are entered. In Offsoo they sit in the client file, linked to the planning and the hours, with the KVK connection keeping the basic details current.
A spreadsheet planning sits partly in the file and partly in the head of whoever maintains it. Illness or departure takes that second part with it. When the status, the checklist of steps and the timeline of earlier remarks are recorded per activity, someone else can pick the work up without needing an hour of questions first.
Not every firm needs planning software. For a one-person practice with a manageable client base, where one person handles everything and nothing has to be handed over, a spreadsheet does its job well. The boundary sits somewhere around the moment a second assignee joins, or the number of recurring activities grows beyond what one person can check from memory.
Two signals that the boundary has been passed in practice: time is structurally spent on maintaining the file itself, and work has been done twice or forgotten at least once because the latest state was not visible.
Less than usually assumed. The client list from the spreadsheet is the basis and comes across through an import. Recurring activities are configured per type of work — VAT, payroll, year-end — not per individual client. For a firm with a few hundred files that is a matter of hours, spread over a few sessions. The steps are described in getting started in four steps.
What stays: Excel is not abolished. For analyses, exports and one-off calculations it remains useful — Offsoo exports hours, clients and planning to Excel, CSV and PDF. It just loses the role of firm-wide planning.
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