The Spreadsheet Trap: How Excel Becomes Technical Debt
It starts innocently. A billing template in Excel. An inventory tracker in Google Sheets. A route plan in another file. Before long, Indian distributors find themselves managing 15-25 spreadsheets across billing, inventory, outstanding, routes, schemes, crate tracking, and reporting.
The problem is not Excel itself — it is a magnificent tool. The problem is that spreadsheets create data silos. When you update inventory in one sheet, it does not update in your billing sheet. When a salesman captures an order in the field, it does not appear in your warehouse sheet until someone manually enters it. Every hand-off is a potential error.
Over time, these spreadsheets become technical debt. They contain formulas nobody fully understands, macros that break with Office updates, and circular references that produce wrong numbers silently. The distributor who built the original templates might have left the company, but the business depends on their Excel architecture.