When a spreadsheet stops working for assessments

Most assessment programmes start in a spreadsheet, and they should. A spreadsheet is free, everyone can already use it, and for one cohort of thirty people it is genuinely the correct tool. Replacing it early is a waste.

The useful question is not whether a spreadsheet is professional. It is whether you have hit one of the points where it starts costing more than it saves.

The first is when two people need to edit at once and you start emailing versions. The moment a file is named with a date and someone's initials, you have lost the single source of truth, and someone will eventually report from the wrong copy.

The second is when you cannot answer a question without rebuilding a view. "How did this department compare to that one last cycle" is a five-minute question if the data is structured and a two-hour question if it lives in tabs shaped around whoever set them up.

The third is history. A spreadsheet holds the current state. It is poor at telling you what a person's score was eighteen months ago, and worse at telling you what changed between then and now. If your programme's entire purpose is to show improvement over time, this is not a minor gap.

The fourth is access. Everyone who can see the file can see all of it. There is no way to let a manager see their own team and nobody else's, and workarounds — separate files per manager — reintroduce the first problem.

The fifth is the audit question. When a promotion decision is questioned, you need to show what evidence existed at the time and who recorded it. A spreadsheet with no change history cannot answer that.

If none of these are biting, stay where you are. If three of them are, you are already paying for a platform in coordination time; you are just paying in hours rather than rupees.