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Spreadsheets can cost an IT team time through repeated asset reconciliation, manual updates, version checks, and explaining what unfamiliar fields or formulas mean. The available evidence documents these sources of friction, but it does not establish a current, universal number of hours lost by IT teams each week. The practical question is whether a particular recurring workflow takes more effort to maintain than to improve, automate, or move into a managed system.
Where spreadsheet work adds up
Reconciling asset records
When information comes from multiple people or systems, someone has to find mismatches, resolve duplicates, and decide which record is current. Ivanti reported in February 2020 that 43% of surveyed IT professionals used spreadsheets among their resources for tracking IT assets; nearly a quarter said they spent hours per week reconciling inventory or assets. The survey was conducted in winter 2019, so these are historical vendor-survey findings, not a current benchmark or a claim that spreadsheets were respondents’ only tracking method. Ivanti’s survey announcement provides the original context.
Finding context and asking for clarification
A workbook can be technically correct and still be difficult to use if its fields, assumptions, formulas, or ownership are unclear. In a 2021 spreadsheet-comprehension study, Ragavan, Sarkar, and Gordon found that participants spent about 40% of their time seeking information needed to understand spreadsheets written by others; 12 of 15 participants went back to the spreadsheet’s author for clarification. This small study concerned comprehension, not IT teams or weekly labor totals, but it illustrates how an undocumented workbook can create information-seeking and coordination work. The study was published at CHI 2021.
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Locating and governing scattered workbooks
When copies of important spreadsheets live across shared drives, collaboration spaces, and individual computers, a team may struggle to identify the authoritative version or review who can change it. Microsoft’s 2012 spreadsheet-controls white paper described this as a governance challenge and noted the difficulty of consistently discovering and inventorying end-user spreadsheets. It is historical guidance, not evidence about current product availability or a measure of present-day IT labor. Microsoft’s white paper discusses the control problem.
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How to tell whether a particular workflow is the problem
Audit one recurring spreadsheet process before deciding that spreadsheets as a whole should be eliminated. Track it over a normal operating period, including time spent updating data, checking it, reconciling differences, comparing versions, and answering questions about the workbook. Record how often work occurs and what happens when a record is stale, duplicated, missing, or assigned incorrectly. This gives your team a baseline for its own workflow rather than relying on an old survey to predict its workload.
- Ownership: Who owns the data, and who is permitted to change it?
- Inputs: How many people or systems supply updates, and how often?
- Traceability: Can the team see who changed a value and why?
- Consequences: What operational, security, or audit problem could follow from a wrong or outdated record?
- Connections: Does the workflow need to exchange information with service tickets, procurement, licensing, device discovery, or audit evidence?
Use the results to choose among improving the workbook, automating a stable repeated step, or moving the workflow into a managed system. Do not assume a fixed return on investment: compare options with the time and risks your team actually measured.
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When IT asset tracking may need a managed system
Asset tracking is a useful case because records change as hardware and software are acquired, assigned, moved, supported, and retired. A managed inventory may reduce manual work when it can keep information fresh and make changes easier to trace. Smartsheet’s IT asset management guide describes capabilities to consider, including asset tracking, compliance and supplier information, automated discovery and inventory audits, lifecycle tracking, process support, and service-desk integration. It is a vendor guide, so treat its feature list as an evaluation framework rather than an independent endorsement. See Smartsheet’s IT asset management guide.
| Evaluation area | Question to ask |
|---|---|
| Discovery and freshness | Can information be collected automatically or on a schedule, or must staff update every record manually? |
| Ownership and lifecycle | Can the system record user, location, assignment, status, and retirement as assets change? |
| Reconciliation and auditability | Can it flag duplicates and preserve a history of changes and corrections? |
| Integration | Can asset data connect to service management, procurement, identity, or reporting systems that matter to your team? |
| Migration and upkeep | What cleanup, import templates, and ongoing administration will the move require? |
| Fit and cost | Are deployment effort and total operating cost appropriate for the inventory’s size and complexity? |
Migration does not necessarily require retyping every row. Flexera documents importing CSV and Excel data through one-time uploads or scheduled repeat imports using an inventory beacon. Its documentation also says templates are fixed and may change with product releases, so a template from another release can fail. These are Flexera-specific details; check the documentation for the version in use before planning an import. Flexera’s import overview explains the documented approach.
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A template can help standardize fields for a small inventory or prepare data for migration. It does not, on its own, discover devices, enforce ownership, or synchronize records as they change. Smartsheet’s guide includes downloadable Excel asset-tracking templates, but a template is not a substitute for those controls when an inventory is large or frequently changing.
Improve or automate the process without creating new risks
Automation helps most when a task repeats, has stable inputs, and has a clear owner. Microsoft Learn recommends formalizing routine, as-needed, and emergency operational tasks with documentation, checklists, or automation; it also advises automating repetitive work prone to human error and reviewing procedures as workloads and teams change. Its example includes generating IT service-management tickets. Read Microsoft’s operational guidance.
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Start with the specific update or handoff that your time log shows is repetitive. Define the expected inputs and result, and retain human review when a decision needs judgment or an automated action could cause harm. A new platform will not fix unclear ownership or inconsistent data by itself; those responsibilities still need to be defined.
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A spreadsheet can remain a sensible choice for a small, bounded workflow when a known owner maintains it, the update process is clear, and mistakes or delays have manageable consequences. The aim is not to ban a familiar tool. It is to recognize when repeated reconciliation, opaque structure, scattered copies, or missing change history make the workbook more costly to operate than the process it supports.
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