As companies grow, organizing information and maintaining control over increasingly complex operations becomes more challenging. Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, founder and director of Enjoy Pets and an entrepreneur with experience in marketplaces and online sales growth, operates in sectors where spreadsheets have long provided a flexible way to manage information, calculations and everyday controls.
Why have spreadsheets survived so many technological changes?
One reason is accessibility. A spreadsheet can be created quickly, modified whenever a new requirement appears and adapted without waiting for software development. For entrepreneurs building an operation, this makes it possible to organize orders, inventory, expenses, suppliers and performance indicators while processes are still changing frequently. This autonomy is particularly valuable in the early stages, when businesses often need to test different ways of organizing information before establishing more standardized procedures.
Flexibility also explains why spreadsheets tend to spread across departments. When existing software does not provide a specific report or control, employees can create their own solution. What begins as a temporary response to a practical need may gradually become part of the company’s daily routine, especially when the file works well enough to avoid immediate replacement. As more activities begin to depend on that file, replacing it can become increasingly difficult even when the original solution no longer matches the complexity of the operation.
For Hugo Galvao, this characteristic is relevant to digital businesses because growth frequently introduces new operational demands. Marketplaces, ecommerce channels and logistics can generate different information flows, and spreadsheets may initially connect gaps between them. The difficulty appears when temporary controls quietly become permanent infrastructure. At that stage, a tool originally adopted for flexibility may start requiring additional manual work simply to keep information synchronized across the business.
When does flexibility become an operational problem?
The warning sign is not simply the number of spreadsheets a company uses. Hugo Galvao draws attention to a more significant operational issue: essential activities may become dependent on manual updates, information copied between files or knowledge held by the person who originally created a particular control. At that point, flexibility can begin to produce operational dependency. The risk becomes greater when only a few employees understand how those files work, making routine activities harder to maintain when responsibilities change or the operation expands.
Version control creates another challenge. If several people download, edit or duplicate the same information, employees may work from different numbers without immediately realizing it. As the volume of orders, products or transactions increases, checking which file contains the latest information can itself become another task within the process. Instead of supporting faster decisions, the spreadsheet can then require additional verification before teams can confidently use the information it contains.
Can spreadsheets delay digital transformation?
They can when their convenience reduces the perceived urgency of redesigning a process. A spreadsheet may compensate for a missing integration, for example, allowing employees to transfer information manually between systems. Because the immediate problem appears solved, the organization can continue operating without addressing the structural reason that manual intervention was necessary. Over time, these temporary workarounds can accumulate and make the operation increasingly dependent on repetitive tasks that could otherwise be integrated or automated.
Digital transformation, however, is not simply the replacement of spreadsheets with more sophisticated software. Purchasing a new platform without understanding how information moves through the business can reproduce the same inefficiencies in another environment. Before choosing technology, companies need to identify which activities are repetitive, where information originates and which decisions depend on it. This assessment helps ensure that digitalization addresses the causes of operational inefficiency rather than simply transferring existing routines to a new system.
In businesses operating across multiple sales channels, Hugo Galvao observes this issue through the practical demands of scale. Inventory, orders, customer information and logistics can affect one another continuously. When these flows remain fragmented, growth increases not only sales volume but also the amount of coordination required behind each transaction. Creating stronger connections between these areas can therefore become essential as the business expands and the volume of information becomes more difficult to manage manually.