Why spreadsheets are bad for automotive business intelligence

Spreadsheets can be an unwitting drain on your dealership — costing you valuable time, money and automotive business intelligence. 

It’s tempting to resort to free spreadsheets when you need auto dealer software, but there are compelling reasons to steer clear. 

Here’s why spreadsheets are bad for your business intelligence and reporting: 

Your Spreadsheets Cost You More Than $9,000 A Year

Time is money.  Every minute you and your teams spend entering data into Excel or Google Sheets is time that is spent landing deals and boosting profit. So, how much is your spreadsheet costing you? 

Let’s follow the numbers:

Assume that for every deal, your team spends a total of 14 minutes inputting data. If you average 100 deals a month, that means your team spends 1400 minutes a month entering data. In dollars, your spreadsheets cost you $799 a month or $9,588 a year. 

Try our calculator to see how much SalesLogs could be saving you. 

Your Intelligence Is Always Out Of Date

Keeping your dealership running efficiently relies on having up-to-the-minute data, and a reliable way for every team member to access it. Unfortunately, using spreadsheets means your decisions will always be based on intelligence that’s out of date — making it unnecessarily difficult to keep up with competitors using specialist auto dealer software. 

For example, downloading an outdated version of your spreadsheet to inform your reporting and forecasts can have disastrous consequences — leaving you with a mismatched strategy and inappropriate goals that are out of step with your actual business needs. 

Related: Data analytics can significantly improve your margins. Discover 3 reasons why you can’t afford the knock-on effect of your spreadsheet’s outdated data, and how to improve your margins, in this blog post on data analytics for car dealers.

They’re Prone To Errors

With great freedom comes… more room for error. Spreadsheets are powerful, without question, but as unmediated interfaces they’re also prone to human error. While it’s reasonable that someone on your team can have a bad day or your attention can slip while you’re entering a dataset, spreadsheets aren’t built to prevent or pick-up mistakes. 

Something as simple as a decimal point in the wrong place, or a spelling mistake in a contact field, can cause havoc with your business intelligence and reporting and significantly impact your profits.

They’re Not Built To Scale With Your Business

The unstructured data in spreadsheets makes it difficult to identify key insights you can use to drive decisions. For example, even if all your data is recorded on a spreadsheet, you’ll likely be left juggling between multiple tabs to gather the insights you need — not practical and definitely not scalable.

They were also originally built for accounting purposes. While they’ve been used for many business processes since then, they don’t offer the flexibility a purpose-built platform can. For example, they can’t help with task management, managing unique workflows, centralised real-time data, or functional team collaboration (to name a few).  

As you grow and scale, sophisticated auto dealer software like SalesLogs can meet your business needs with the future in mind. 

Save time and money with SalesLogs

The sooner you transition from spreadsheets to a centralised business intelligence platform that’s purpose built for your industry, the more you stand to save and the faster you can scale.  

For example, with its easy data capture and consolidation features, SalesLogs cuts data capture time in half — saving you 140 hours and $4,794 a year in deal inputs alone. But deals are the tip of the iceberg. From everyday admin to dealership reporting, SalesLogs slashes administration time for every department in your dealership. 

Book a no-obligation SalesLogs demo. Simply click here and one of our team will be in contact.