The Excel that became your operating system

Every business has a file.

You know which one. The one you open every day. The one with twelve tabs, colors only you understand, and a column called "WATCH" in yellow.

The one that, if it corrupts, the company stops.

I've had one. Several times. And I'm fond of it, genuinely.

This year I got to see it from the other side. And it hurts differently when it isn't yours.

The ladder that became the second floor

Imagine you need to get something onto the roof and you put up a ladder. Perfect. That's what they're for.

Then you lay a plank on top to rest your tools. Then another. Then someone stands up there and works every day.

Three years later you have four people working on a structure that was designed for ONE person to climb for A WHILE.

Nobody made a bad decision. Each individual step was reasonable.

Excel is an excellent ladder. The problem is when it becomes the floor your operation lives on.

When Excel is the right answer

I want to be fair, because this topic gets discussed with way too much dogma.

Excel is the right call when:

• You're exploring and you still don't know what the process is.
• It's a one-time analysis.
• Only you touch it.
• The data isn't the source of truth for anything. It's a snapshot of something that lives somewhere else.
• You need to answer a specific question today and it isn't worth building anything.

I use Excel for all of that, constantly. It's the most flexible tool there is, and that flexibility is exactly its value.

The problem isn't using it. The problem is not noticing when you crossed the line.

The 8-hour file

This year, at Apunto, I met a client like that.

A freight forwarder. Real operations. The kind that moves cargo every day.

Their operation depends, practically ONE HUNDRED percent, on a spreadsheet.

It has to be updated every 8 hours. Like a shift change. If the file isn't current, the day doesn't exist.

It passes through 4 or 5 hands daily. Each person fills in their piece. The org chart doesn't matter. What matters is that it's a relay race and the baton is an Excel file.

If someone fails to fill it in, they can't generate the daily close.

And that isn't "we didn't get the report."

That's losing the business.

Forwarders and carriers work with the MARGINS OF THE DAY. The number that tells you whether today paid or you worked for free. If the Excel doesn't close, that number doesn't exist. You make decisions blind. Or you don't make them. Which is worse.

Nobody did anything wrong putting it in Excel. It started as the ladder. Then the plank. Then four people standing on it every 8 hours.

The clearest part of all: that company's calendar is dictated by the file, not the other way around.

The 8 hours aren't the process. They're the tool's limitation turned into a work schedule.

I was there too, in one of my own companies. Because the file was fragile, we started designing the operation around what it could survive. We didn't add a new data point because "it would break the formulas." We didn't give someone access because "they'll throw it off." We postponed process changes because they meant rebuilding the file.

That's the line. When your tool starts dictating how you work, the tool has already gotten too small.

The signs you've already crossed

Count how many apply:

There's more than one version. "Sales_2026_FINAL_v3_JORGE.xlsx". If two files exist for the same purpose, nobody knows which one is the truth.

Someone has it open and everyone else waits. You literally locked your operation with a file lock.

It passes through more than two hands a day. Each hand is a failure point. Nobody tells you which one failed. Only that the close didn't come out.

A formula broke and nobody knew when. The numbers came out wrong for weeks and decisions got made with them.

Only one person understands it. And if that person leaves — or gets sick on a Friday — they leave with the company's operating manual in their head.

You copy and paste from one file to another. Every copy-paste is a chance for an error nobody is going to audit.

You don't know who changed what. A number is different from last week's and there's no way to know why.

You have to update it by hand, on a cycle. Every 8 hours. Every day. Every week. Doesn't matter. That's hours of expensive people doing work that doesn't require judgment. It requires they don't mess up the copy.

You're afraid something will happen to it. If the word "afraid" shows up when you think about a file, there's your answer.

Three or more, and you no longer have a spreadsheet. You have a critical system with no backup, no permissions, no audit trail, and no owner.

What Excel cannot give you, by design

It isn't a matter of using it better. There are things it structurally does not have:

• It doesn't know who did what, or when.
• It has no permissions by role. It's all or nothing.
• It doesn't alert you about anything. A cell doesn't call you when the 4pm person didn't fill in their part. The close just doesn't come out.
• It doesn't connect to the rest. The data has to be moved by hand, always.
• It doesn't validate. You can type "tomorrow" in a date column and nobody stops you.
• It doesn't handle relationships well. A customer with several invoices and several payments is a relational model, and a flat sheet is not that.

That last point is the one that breaks most Mexican SMEs, because real operations — quotes, invoices, partial payments, complements, credit notes — are inherently relational.

In a forwarder it looks even rawer: one shipment, several carriers, several costs, one margin for the day. That doesn't fit on a tab without someone holding it together in their head.

Hang in there, we're almost done.

How to get out without stopping the company

Migrating is scary for a reason. I've done it badly and I've done it well.

1. Don't migrate everything at once. Pick the process that hurts most. One. In the case above, it would be the daily close. The one that, if it's missing, the day stops.
2. Run in parallel for two or three weeks. Yes, it's double work. That's the price of sleeping well. And in this industry you can't pause the trucks while "we finish the system."
3. Compare the numbers on both sides. This is where you find the old errors. Get ready. When I finally migrated one of these, there were formulas that had been calculating wrong for months, and cells with hardcoded values where there should have been a calculation. We had been making decisions on incorrect numbers for who knows how long. Nobody did anything wrong. Simply nobody could review it.
4. The team trains with real data, not dummy data. Nobody learns from invented numbers. Even less so if the number at stake is the day's margin.
5. Delete the old file. Seriously. If you leave it "just in case," half the team will keep using it and you'll have two truths, which is worse than having one bad one.
6. Keep Excel for what it's actually good at: one-off analysis, exploration, one-time reports.

Point 5 is where almost every migration I've seen fails. People go back to what they know the moment there's pressure, and if the door is still open, they will use it.

The honest question

It isn't "does Excel work?". Of course it works.

The question is:

What happens if that file disappears tomorrow?

If the answer involves the word "disaster" — or "there's no close," or "we don't know if the day paid" — it isn't a spreadsheet anymore. It's critical infrastructure for your company, running without any of the protections critical infrastructure needs.

And you're holding it up with the memory of four people and the hope that nobody messes up a copy-paste, every 8 hours.

What's YOUR file called? The one that, if it gets lost, everything stops.

If you've got that file and you're ready to make the jump, let's talk. There's always time to put things in order.

hola@jorgenajera.com or LinkedIn.

If you have a freight forwarder, getting that operation out of Excel is basically what Apunto does. For the rest of a Mexican SME — quoting, invoicing, collecting, so the message doesn't live in a loose file — that's what Actiun does.