Spreadsheets are free, familiar, and flexible. For a business in its early stages, they're often exactly the right tool. The problem isn't that spreadsheets are bad. The problem is that businesses keep using them long after they've stopped being appropriate.
The Four Hidden Costs of Spreadsheet Operations
1. Manual Data Entry and the Errors It Produces. The error rate for manual data entry typically sits between 1% and 4%. In a business processing 500 transactions a month, that's five to twenty errors. Each one requires time to identify, investigate, and correct.
2. Time Spent on Non-Value Work. For most SMEs, the hidden admin burden is between 10 and 25 hours per week. At an average fully-loaded cost of €40 per hour, that's €20,000 to €50,000 per year spent on tasks that a well-designed automation system would handle in seconds.
3. Decisions Made on Stale Data. Spreadsheets are point-in-time snapshots. A properly designed internal system — built on Supabase with real-time data queries and a Bubble-based dashboard — gives decision-makers a live view of operations.
4. Operational Knowledge Locked in Individual Files. When processes live in spreadsheets owned by individuals, a well-designed internal system externalises the process logic. Anyone with the right permissions can run the process and see its history.
The Inflection Point: When Spreadsheets Become a Liability
Multiple people needing to update the same data simultaneously, ops team growth making onboarding into spreadsheet systems its own project, inability to get a real-time operational view, preparing for a funding round or audit. If any of these describe your situation, the cost of staying on spreadsheets is now higher than the cost of replacing them.
What Replacing Spreadsheets Actually Looks Like
An internal tool built on Bubble, connected to a Supabase database, with n8n handling automation and integration logic. Faster to build than custom development (typically 6–10 weeks), maintainable by non-technical team members, scalable, and extensible.
A Real-World Example: Sofia's Recruitment Agency
Sofia runs a specialist recruitment agency in Amsterdam with twelve consultants. Operations ran on spreadsheets and email: candidate tracking, client updates, placement confirmations, invoice triggers. We built a candidate tracking system in Bubble with a Supabase backend, with n8n workflows triggering invoice generation automatically and sending weekly status summaries to clients. Time to live: eight weeks. The operations manager recovered two days per week. Invoice errors dropped to near zero. The total development cost paid for itself in under four months.
The ROI Calculation Most Businesses Skip
Take weekly hours on manual data work, multiply by fully-loaded hourly cost, multiply by 52. Add error costs. For most SMEs that go through this calculation honestly, the number is €30,000 to €100,000 per year. An internal tool costing €20,000 to build and €500/month to run is an obvious investment. The spreadsheet isn't free. It's just billing you in a currency that doesn't show up on an invoice.
