In the fall of 2020, England’s public health agency left 15,841 positive COVID-19 cases out of its daily numbers.
The cause wasn’t a cyberattack or a crashed server. According to The Register, test results were being stored in an older .XLS Excel format that limits each sheet to 65,536 rows. Each result took up several rows, so the real limit was about 1,400 cases per sheet. Everything after that was simply left off when the data was imported.
Nobody noticed the ceiling until they’d already hit it.
Spreadsheets fail quietly
This isn’t a story about one bad day. Researcher Raymond Panko at the University of Hawai’i spent years studying errors in real business spreadsheets. In his summary of field audits, “94% of the 88 spreadsheets audited in 7 studies have contained errors,” with errors in 5.2% of cells on average. He also noted that the audits probably caught only a fraction of the mistakes. The research is older (last revised in 2005), but it keeps being confirmed by stories like the one above.
Sometimes the stakes are enormous. In 2012, JPMorgan Chase lost at least $6.2 billion in what became known as the “London Whale” trades. A U.S. Senate report found that one of the bank’s risk models required “error-prone manual data entry.” As Forbes quoted from the bank’s own task force report, the model “operated through a series of Excel spreadsheets, which had to be completed manually, by a process of copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another.”
If that can happen at the largest bank in the U.S., it can happen in a 20-person business.
Signs you’ve hit the spreadsheet ceiling
From what we see with growing businesses (our observations, not a study):
- Only one person really understands how “the sheet” works, and everyone panics when they’re on vacation.
- Someone copies data from one spreadsheet to another every week.
- There are files called “Final_v3_REAL” and nobody is sure which one is current.
- Customers find mistakes before your team does.
But enterprise software isn’t the automatic answer
The usual advice is to “get a proper system.” Big systems carry their own risks, though. In Panorama Consulting’s 2026 ERP Report, more than a quarter of organizations said their ERP project went over budget, and almost a quarter said it ran over schedule. Those were mostly large companies: the 170 respondents had a median annual revenue of $200.5 million.
Go bigger and it gets worse. A McKinsey study of large IT projects, those over $15 million, found that on average they “run 45 percent over budget and 7 percent over time, while delivering 56 percent less value than predicted.”
To be fair, most ERP projects in Panorama’s survey did not go over budget, and the McKinsey numbers describe very large projects. The real lesson is about fit. Software built for a company with 5,000 employees rarely fits one with 25, and you end up paying for features you’ll never use.
The middle path
Between “keep patching the spreadsheet” and “buy an enterprise system” there is a third option: a small, custom tool built around the way your business already works. It keeps the parts of the spreadsheet your team likes and removes the copy-and-paste steps where errors creep in.
Custom tools have trade-offs too. Someone has to maintain them, and a tool nobody documented can recreate the same “only one person understands it” problem. So ask any builder, including us: Who maintains this? Where is it documented? What happens if you’re gone?
Spreadsheets are still great for plenty of work: quick analysis, one-off models, early experiments. The trouble starts when the business runs on them.
At HME Solutions, we build right-sized AI tools for businesses too big for spreadsheets and too small for enterprise software, and we support them after launch. Big-company tools, small-business prices.
What’s the one spreadsheet your business couldn’t survive losing?
Sources
- The Register, “What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases,” October 5, 2020
- Raymond R. Panko, University of Hawai’i, “What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors,” revised January 2005
- U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, “JPMorgan Chase Whale Trades: A Case History of Derivatives Risks and Abuses,” 2013
- Forbes (Tom Groenfeldt), “Solutions To Spreadsheet Risk Post JPM’s London Whale,” February 19, 2013
- Panorama Consulting Group, “The 2026 ERP Report,” March 2026
- McKinsey & Company (Bloch, Blumberg, Laartz), “Delivering large-scale IT projects on time, on budget, and on value,” October 1, 2012
HME Solutions builds custom tools like this for small businesses. See our automation services, how we work, or get in touch.
Frequently asked questions
How common are errors in business spreadsheets?
In his summary of field audits, researcher Raymond Panko found that 94% of the 88 spreadsheets audited in 7 studies contained errors, with errors in 5.2% of cells on average. The research dates from 2005 but keeps being confirmed.
What is the alternative to spreadsheets and enterprise software?
A small custom tool built around the way your business already works. It keeps the parts of the spreadsheet your team likes and removes the copy-and-paste steps where errors creep in, as long as someone maintains and documents it.