All my data in one place
This is the key one – almost all business have too many spreadsheets, many of which contain the same data repeatedly. You often can’t easily tell which one is the latest, or when one has been updated, and so on.
The relevant bit of jargon is the “single source of truth”, and that’s what you should aim for. Only one place where you can keep a customer’s address or order history, one price list, one list of products and so on. Any applications in your business (including spreadsheets) can then reference this central data source for the information that they need.
Scalable – it can expand as required
We hope that your business will grow, and a database will grow with you. Obviously you can add more and more data to it as it stands, but you can also add more tables, and new bits of data to existing tables. Properly-built database systems can handle huge amounts of data without breaking a sweat.
Security and control
If you leave your laptop on a train, or it gets stolen, you may have it stuffed full of your confidential spreadsheets, and customer lists and so on – gold dust to the right (or wrong!) person. Database authentication, access control, encryption, and so on can help protect the core data.
You can also limit and control what other people in your business can do – if you want to keep the ability to give a customer a discount to yourself, then disable the relevant permissions for all the other users.
Data integrity
You can control the data you store, by cross-referencing and indexing it. Entered the same contact email address twice? The system can flag that and prevent duplicates – not so easy in a spreadsheet.
Constraints can keep things tidy – no orders without valid customers, no orders with non-existent products, no over-selling of your stock, and so on. All these things are harder in a spreadsheet, especially if multiple people are trying to update it at the same time.
Reporting and Management Information
Again, this is much easier with a database – you know exactly where everything is, and it ties up neatly, and can be queried, sorted, and grouped quickly and easily – you can use other tools to produce complex graphs and summaries (for example Microsoft’s PowerBI business intelligence tool).
No more need to manually assemble reports every week or month – just press a button, or even open a screen and see the real-time information.
So what are you waiting for?
In this day and age, your business data is one of your most important assets – perhaps it’s time that you started treating it as such? We are happy to have a conversation about the options available to you, from the simplest to the most complex, whether desktop or online.
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