Excel or management software: an honest comparison for a small business

What each does well

Excel: already installed or free, very flexible (you build exactly the table you want), usable offline, and almost everyone knows how to use it.

Management software: a single entry at the sale updates the stock, the totals, the margin and the customer’s credit; several sellers work at the same time; data is backed up automatically.

The comparison in eight criteria

• Recording a sale: Excel, several cells to fill in or copy; software, a few taps.
• Stock: Excel, corrected by hand after each sale; software, updated automatically with an out-of-stock alert.
• Calculations (totals, margin, change): Excel, by your formulas, which can be broken by mistake; software, automatic.
• Several sellers: Excel, a file that is hard to share; software, one account per seller with their own permissions.
• Payments (cash, mobile money, card): Excel, one more column to maintain; software, recorded at every sale with a total per method.
• Customer credit: Excel, a sheet to cross-check with sales; software, a credit book linked to every sale with reminders.
• Backup: Excel, you do it yourself; software, automatic.
• Cost: Excel, free but your time is not; software, a subscription, often repaid by the time saved and mistakes avoided.

The real cost of Excel: your time

Twenty minutes of re-entry or checking a day adds up to roughly a hundred hours a year. Add the mistakes: a price copied wrongly, a forgotten stock movement, a deleted formula. The cost of Excel is not in the licence, but in the time and in the gaps you do not see.

When to stay on Excel, when to switch to software

• Stay on Excel if you sell little each day, work alone and have few products.
• Switch to software if several people sell, if your stock moves every day, if you sell on credit or if your evening accounts never add up.
• Also switch if you spend more than half an hour a day maintaining your file.
• These are rules of thumb: only your real time and your mistakes count.

Moving from Excel to software without losing everything

• Clean up your product list: name, selling price, purchase price, stock quantity.
• Count the real stock so you start from an accurate base.
• Copy or import the products (depending on the software).
• Use the software and your file side by side for three days, then compare the evening totals.
• Keep the old Excel file as an archive.

Excel and Kaislo together

Kaislo offers a 30-day free trial so you can compare with your file on real days. Kaislo reports export to Excel and PDF: you keep your tables for your accountant. The free Excel template on this page is a good starting point if you want to begin with Excel.