What does it cost to replace spreadsheets with custom software?

Replacing the spreadsheets a business actually runs on is usually a focused business system at $25,000 to $60,000. If the spreadsheets span several departments or locations, it becomes a connected platform at $60,000 to $150,000.

The spreadsheets themselves are rarely the expensive part.

Why the price is not about the spreadsheet

A spreadsheet is a workflow that nobody wrote down. The columns are the easy bit. The expensive bit is everything the file does not record:

Which copy is the real one, when three people have a version
What the rules actually are, including the exceptions someone applies by eye
Who is allowed to change what, which is currently enforced by politeness
What happens next after a row changes, which today is someone remembering

Most of a migration is interviewing the people who maintain it and turning habits into rules. That is the work, and it is the reason two businesses with identically shaped spreadsheets can get different quotes.

When it is worth doing

The same data is retyped into more than one place
Someone is afraid to touch the file because it might break
The answer to a simple question requires opening it and scrolling
Two people have made different decisions from different copies
Onboarding a new person means teaching them a file rather than a process
It has started to fail at month end, quietly

When it is not worth doing yet

Plenty of spreadsheets are fine. A spreadsheet that one person maintains, that nobody else depends on, and that is doing arithmetic rather than coordinating work, is a good tool being used correctly. Replacing it buys nothing.

Before a custom build, the cheaper fixes genuinely worth trying:

Move it to a shared, versioned place so there is one copy
Lock the columns that should not be edited
Replace the manual re-entry with a form that writes into it
Buy the product, if the spreadsheet is doing a job a product does

If those fix it, they fix it for a few hundred pounds rather than tens of thousands, and we would rather tell you that than take the project.

What the replacement usually looks like

Not a prettier spreadsheet. One record per real thing, the workflow around it, roles so the field sees less than the office, and the two or three reports that replace the scrolling.

The important design decision is what the record is: a job, a client, a property, a shipment. Get that right and the rest follows. Get it wrong and you have rebuilt the spreadsheet with a login.

The migration itself

Budget for the data being worse than described. Every spreadsheet migration finds duplicate rows, inconsistent spellings, dates in three formats and a column that means two different things depending on when it was filled in.

Cleaning that is part of the project. It is also the point at which the business learns things about itself, and it is usually the most valuable week.

Likely ongoing costs

A service plan, from $500 a month
Hosting, which at this size is modest
Nothing for the spreadsheets, which is the saving people forget to count

What to do next

Describe the problem if you want a preliminary plan with a pricing range attached, or see Business Systems for what a focused build includes.