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Guide · Data

What Can Your Spreadsheets Tell You?

01The answers you already own

Every invoice you've raised, quote you've sent and job you've booked is a record of how your business actually works — as opposed to how it feels like it works. Most owners make big decisions on instinct: which customers to chase, when to hire, what to charge. Instinct is valuable. Instinct checked against your own numbers is better.

02Questions worth asking

• Who are my most valuable customers? Not the biggest — the most profitable once time, travel and late payment are counted. The 80/20 rule often holds: a fifth of customers bring in most of the profit.
• When are my busy and quiet periods? Two or three years of sales by month usually shows a pattern you can plan cash, staff and marketing around.
• Which products or jobs make money? Margin by job type often surprises people. The work you enjoy most isn't always the work that pays.
• Who pays late? Average days-to-pay by customer turns a vague worry into a list.
• Where are costs creeping? Supplier prices, fuel, subscriptions — small rises are easy to miss month to month and obvious over a year.
• How many quotes turn into work? Your win rate, and how it varies by job type or source, tells you where to spend your time.

03Getting your data into shape

Most of the effort in any data project is tidying, not analysis. Four habits make everything easier:

1. One row per record — one sale, one job, one invoice per row, with headings across the top.
2. Consistent names — "J Smith Ltd", "J. Smith" and "Smiths" are three customers to a computer.
3. Dates as real dates and numbers as real numbers — not text, and no "£1,200 (approx)" in a figures column.
4. No merged cells, colour-coding as data, or subtotals mixed in — if it matters, give it its own column.

Your accounting or job-management software can usually export clean data directly, which is often better than a spreadsheet maintained by hand.

04Pivot tables: the most underused tool in Excel

A pivot table summarises thousands of rows in seconds — sales by customer, by month, by product — without a single formula. If you learn one thing in Excel this year, make it this.

AI assistants help a great deal here. Describe what you want in plain English and they'll explain the steps, write the formula or spot why yours isn't working. Some can analyse a spreadsheet you upload directly — but the data safety rules still apply: anonymise customer details or use a business-tier tool.

05When to move to a dashboard

Spreadsheets are perfect for answering a question once. When you find yourself rebuilding the same report every month, or several people need the same numbers, it's time for a dashboard — a live, one-page view that updates itself from your data. Tools like Power BI and Google's Looker Studio are free or inexpensive at small-business scale, and connect to most accounts and booking software.

A good dashboard answers four or five questions you care about, at a glance, every Monday morning. If it shows thirty charts, it answers none.

Want to see what this looks like? Our live data analysis demo turns a sample dataset into findings in seconds.

06Where to start

Pick one question from the list above — the one that keeps you up at night — and answer it with the data you have, however imperfect. One real answer builds the habit, and shows you exactly which data you wish you'd been collecting.