Bramvia — Business Central Experts
If your team works around the system every day, your ERP has already failed — here's the one-sentence test
Users working around the system with spreadsheets means the ERP has stopped being the system of record. The test takes a sentence, the diagnosis takes an afternoon, and the fix is usually configuration and integration — not a new ERP.
Short answer: there is a one-sentence test for whether your ERP is still doing its job. If people need a spreadsheet to do their daily work, the ERP has already stopped being your system of record — whatever the licence says. It doesn't fail with an outage; it fails quietly, as each team builds the workaround that lets them get through the week. Pricing lives in one person's file. Shipping is re-keyed into the carrier's portal. The real stock figure is a tab called actual. Month-end is an export, three reconciliations and a phone call. None of that is laziness — every workaround was a reasonable response to something the system couldn't do. But collectively they mean nobody is looking at the same number, and that is why your reports disagree and your margin is a surprise.
The test, and how to run it this week
Ask five people in different departments the same question: "What do you keep in a spreadsheet, and why?"
Don't ask whether they use spreadsheets — everyone says no. Ask what they keep in one. The answers map your failure points precisely, and they arrive in an hour.
Typical replies and what each one means:
| What they keep | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Customer-specific prices and discounts | Pricing rules the system can't express — so every order is a judgement call |
| "Real" stock, versus what the system says | Inventory accuracy has been abandoned; purchasing is guessing |
| Order status for key customers | No usable order-tracking view, so service depends on one person's file |
| Shipping details re-typed into a carrier portal | No integration; every keystroke is a chance to ship to the wrong address |
| Commission calculations | Sales data that can't be sliced the way the business is actually run |
| A monthly report rebuilt from exports | Reporting layer missing — and a day of work every month, forever |
| Which parts are really the same part | Master data nobody has cleaned; you are buying the same item twice |
What it costs, concretely
- Hours. A report rebuilt every Monday is 50 days of work a year hiding in plain sight.
- Errors that become money. Re-keyed data ships to the wrong address, invoices the wrong price, orders the wrong quantity. Each one is a credit note or a lost customer.
- Decisions made on the wrong number. Two departments, two spreadsheets, two versions of the truth — and a meeting that ends in "let's check and come back."
- Knowledge that walks out. This is the expensive one. With warehouse turnover around 49% a year, the person who maintained the file leaves and takes the logic with them. We saw exactly this at a US distribution client: procedures lived in heads rather than in the ERP, so every departure cost re-learning and errors — a cost that never appeared as a line in the accounts and was larger than the freight increase everyone was discussing.
- Audit and insurance exposure. Controls that exist in a spreadsheet are controls you cannot evidence. That matters more than it used to.
The four reasons workarounds appear
Knowing which one you have decides what you fix.
1. The system can do it, but nobody configured it. The most common by far, and the cheapest to fix. Customer price groups, reorder points, approval workflows, saved views — capability sitting unused because the implementation stopped at go-live.
2. It needs an integration that was never built. Shopify, Amazon, a 3PL, a carrier, EDI from a large customer. People are the integration. Rebuilding these on APIs removes whole spreadsheets at once — and modern ERPs expose the endpoints to do it properly rather than by screen-scraping.
3. It needs a small extension. A field, a validation, a document layout. Hours of work, not a project — if your platform lets you extend without modifying the standard.
4. The system genuinely can't. The honest minority. An ERP with no multi-location inventory will not get one. This is the case that justifies a migration — and it should be identified by elimination, after the first three, not assumed at the start.
Shadow IT is a symptom, not a crime
The instinct is to ban spreadsheets. It fails, because the spreadsheet is load-bearing: remove it and the work stops. The sequence that works is the reverse:
- Inventory the workarounds (the five-question exercise above).
- Sort them into the four categories.
- Fix categories 1 and 2 first. Configuration and integration usually eliminate most of the files within weeks, and they're the cheapest work you'll ever buy.
- Then decide whether what remains justifies extensions or a platform change — with a list, not a feeling.
Only at step 4 is "new ERP" a legitimate answer. Anyone who reaches it in step 1 is selling, not diagnosing.
How we do it
We run this as part of the free assessment: the workaround inventory, sorted into those four buckets, with an estimate for each. If you want it quantified in dollars — hours consumed, errors produced, cash affected — that's the Profit Leak Audit, a fixed fee on any ERP.
And to be explicit about the incentive: we would rather tell you that configuration and two integrations fix 80% of your problem than sell you a migration. It's a smaller invoice, and it's how the relationship starts. Our US client began exactly that way — one small paid piece of work, then part by part, now two years in.
FAQ
Isn't some spreadsheet use normal? Yes. Ad-hoc analysis, modelling, one-off exercises — fine. The red flag is a spreadsheet that is required for a recurring operational process to complete.
Our ERP is fine, the users just don't use it properly. Sometimes true, and training is the fix. But if five people independently built the same workaround, the system or its configuration is the problem, not the people.
We can't stop to fix this. The five-question exercise takes an hour and costs nothing. Doing it is not stopping.
What if the answer really is a new ERP? Then you'll have a documented list of what your current system cannot do — which is the only honest basis for that decision, and the best negotiating tool you can walk into a partner meeting with.
Curious what your team keeps in spreadsheets? Free assessment, no commitment — we run the exercise with you.