4 Signs Your Inventory Asset Management Has Outgrown Excel

Microsoft Excel can be useful in the right circumstances. However, when it comes to your inventory asset management, relying on spreadsheets can hold your company back. When you're small, it's easy to turn to spreadsheets, but as you get bigger, you shouldn't have to rely on a system that doesn't help you manage your assets effectively.

Stay on the lookout for these signs that your management process has outgrown Microsoft Excel.

Your Management System Makes It Difficult for Your Team to Communicate

When it comes to managing your assets, your team needs to be able to communicate. If the way you handle your assets now makes it difficult for your team to talk to each other, it's time to rethink your strategy. Spreadsheets might have worked when your team was small, but now that you've hired more employees, it's almost impossible to have everyone work on the same document. You shouldn't have to worry about all of your team getting the memo when it comes to managing your inventory. With a non-Excel solution dedicated to robust asset tracking, everyone will be able to see what is going on with your assets at any given time as long as they are given access to your database.

Your Inventory Asset Management System Is Not Equipped to Handle All of Your Data

Keeping track of all of your inventory can take a significant amount of time. When you have thousands of items to track in any given day, it can make more effort than you currently have to try and track all of it. Spreadsheets are not optimized to track a large amount of inventory across multiple locations. They also do not work well if you have more than one person managing and adding to them.

You Can't Easily Monitor Your Assets

Whether you are a team of only a few, or large corporation of hundreds, you need to be able to monitor all of your assets across multiple departments. However, when you rely on Excel, you can't easily observe what is happening in your company in real time. Your departments can certainly try, but they will probably get caught up in trying to decide what they see and make sense of the format. For example, one of our clients, First Baptist Church, went from using no asset tracking system to implementing our program which helped them easily keep track of their audiovisual equipment across several different locations. Our platform also allowed them to perform a check-in and check-out feature to help members have the equipment they needed to host events.

Your Company Is Scaling Quickly

If your company has seen a considerable amount of growth over the past year, your inventory asset management system needs to be able to scale with you. Spreadsheets are complicated to mount without putting in a considerable amount of work and time. It can take so long that by the time you changed it to match what you need, your company will have changed again. This situation is simply unacceptable regarding business growth and can hold you back from earning more money and operating efficiently.

Do any of these signs sound familiar to you? Don't wait too long to switch from Excel. It may be "good enough" for your asset tracking needs for now, but you don't want to regret having said that down the road while also dealing with the headaches that will arise from this non-flexible software.