Most ops teams know their spreadsheet is a problem. Few can quantify what it actually costs them. We tried to.
A logistics partner asked us to estimate the dollar cost of running their inventory through a single shared Google Sheet. Twenty-six users, six locations, three product categories. The team felt the pain in their bones, but they could not name the number.
We instrumented their existing process for two weeks: every override, every late update, every reconciliation pass. The headline figure was an annual leak of roughly the cost of two full-time hires, plus a soft cost no one budgets for: the team’s confidence in their own data.
We replaced the sheet with a thin custom platform on Postgres. Same nouns, same verbs, but with audit trails, role-based edits, and a real reconciliation flow. The aim was not to make the team work differently. The aim was to make their existing instincts cheaper to act on.
Three months in, the override rate is one tenth of what it was. The reconciliation pass moved from end-of-month to end-of-day. The team did not get faster, the system stopped slowing them down.