How to move off a spreadsheet without stopping the business

Why not to move everything

Because a full migration requires the business to stop, and it will not stop. Orders keep going out during the move, and each one is a decision about whether to record it in the old spreadsheet or the new system.

The moment that decision exists it will fall both ways, and that is the worst state of all: neither spreadsheet nor system, but both of them partial.

Start with one supplier

The right supplier to start with is not the largest but the one that generates the most movement or the most trouble. In a food business that is usually the produce supplier; elsewhere it is whoever changes their price list most often.

One supplier is enough for the whole chain to run end to end once: price list, order, goods receipt, invoice, approval and payment. That is what needs to be seen, rather than a complete supplier list nobody has ordered from yet.

What to move, and in what order

Note what is not in the table: history. Orders already delivered and paid do not need to move, and the time spent moving them comes out of the only thing that matters in a migration, which is that the next cycle works.

What to leave in the spreadsheet deliberately

The history, as above, and everything that is not procurement. A spreadsheet is a good tool for cutting data in ways you did not plan for, and that is exactly what it will carry on doing: you export to it when there is a new question to ask.

What it stops being is the place the data lives. That difference is the whole migration, and it requires deleting no file at all.

How to tell after a month whether it worked

Not by how comfortable it was. A migration is always less comfortable at first, and that measures the habit rather than the system.

The honest measure is to ask three questions about that one supplier that used to take time: how much did we pay them this month, was there an invoice that did not match, and where is the confirmation for the last payment. If all three are answered on one screen without searching a mailbox, the migration did what it was for.

And if one of them still needs a search, that is usually not a failure of the system but a sign that one link in the chain is still happening outside it. Most often it is the goods receipt, which is the easiest link to skip.

And when not to move at all

When one person orders from one supplier five times a month and pays for it themselves. There the spreadsheet describes reality completely, and a system would add a step without adding control.

The sign that this has changed is not the size of the business but the number of people who touch the same purchase. The moment an order passes between more than one person, the spreadsheet stops describing who did what, and that is the thing it cannot do at any size.