10 Reasons Why You Should Not Use Excel To Manage and Update CRM Data
Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2024 8:17 am
CRM systems are essential tools for businesses of all sizes. Ensuring that you have clean CRM data to work with is necessary for making the most of the data that you collect—and maximizing your growth.
Unfortunately, many companies are still living in the past, passing Excel files back and forth, and performing annoying and tedious data maintenance tasks to ensure that their data stays clean. Often, data quality ios database improvement initiatives are a company-wide effort with individuals from any department that uses customer data playing at least a small role.
However, managing and updating CRM data using Excel CSVs can be problematic for many reasons. Here are 10 reasons not to use Excel to manage and update your CRM data.
1. Excel Requires a Specific Skill Set
While Excel has a deep feature set that can help solve almost any data-related problem, it does require specific skills.
You should be comfortable with basic Excel functions like sorting, filtering, and formatting data. More advanced skills like using VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, INDEX-MATCH, pivot tables, and creating macros can be very beneficial.
For that reason, among the others listed in this article, Excel is not an ideal solution for data maintenance tasks.
2. Customer Data Maintenance in Excel Is Time-Consuming
Managing and updating CRM data in Excel can be a lengthy process. Tasks such as data entry, data cleaning, report generation, and troubleshooting errors need to be done manually, which can take up a significant amount of time.
For example, if you're importing new CRM data into Excel, you might need to spend time cleaning the data, removing duplicates, and checking for errors. All of these tasks require custom solutions in Excel. And, because each CSV will only contain a fraction of your records, you’ll have to repeat the tasks across many CSVs to clean your entire database.
Unfortunately, many companies are still living in the past, passing Excel files back and forth, and performing annoying and tedious data maintenance tasks to ensure that their data stays clean. Often, data quality ios database improvement initiatives are a company-wide effort with individuals from any department that uses customer data playing at least a small role.
However, managing and updating CRM data using Excel CSVs can be problematic for many reasons. Here are 10 reasons not to use Excel to manage and update your CRM data.
1. Excel Requires a Specific Skill Set
While Excel has a deep feature set that can help solve almost any data-related problem, it does require specific skills.
You should be comfortable with basic Excel functions like sorting, filtering, and formatting data. More advanced skills like using VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, INDEX-MATCH, pivot tables, and creating macros can be very beneficial.
For that reason, among the others listed in this article, Excel is not an ideal solution for data maintenance tasks.
2. Customer Data Maintenance in Excel Is Time-Consuming
Managing and updating CRM data in Excel can be a lengthy process. Tasks such as data entry, data cleaning, report generation, and troubleshooting errors need to be done manually, which can take up a significant amount of time.
For example, if you're importing new CRM data into Excel, you might need to spend time cleaning the data, removing duplicates, and checking for errors. All of these tasks require custom solutions in Excel. And, because each CSV will only contain a fraction of your records, you’ll have to repeat the tasks across many CSVs to clean your entire database.