The week your spreadsheet stops working

Nobody plans to run a company on a spreadsheet. It just happens. You hire your fifth person, you copy a tab, and eleven months later that tab is the only record of who is owed what.

The break rarely arrives as a crisis. It arrives as a question you can't answer quickly: how many days does Sam have left, and does that include the two he took in March?

Four signs the spreadsheet is done: two people edit it, nobody trusts the leave balance column, you re-key the same person into three tools, and you can't tell who changed a number or when.

Start with one thing. Load your people and their leave balances. Get every request into one place. Once that is true, everything else — documents, hiring, reviews — has somewhere to hang.