A spreadsheet costs nothing to open. The cost shows up in the hours spent keeping it current and in what it never tells you.
JRNY is a sales CRM built by BetterQA, a software testing company in Cluj-Napoca. This post is a way to put your own numbers on spreadsheet client management. You may well find the spreadsheet is the right tool for your size, and the last section says when.
Time spent on updates
Start with the cost you can measure. Ask each person who edits the sheet how many hours a week they spend on it: typing in new contacts, copying details from emails, fixing formulas, merging two versions that drifted apart. Multiply by the number of people and an hourly cost.
Use your own figures. Estimates from other companies are not a substitute, because a sheet with one editor and a sheet with ten behave very differently.
Lost context
A spreadsheet only holds what someone typed in. If a conversation happened by email and nobody copied the gist into a cell, the sheet does not know about it. The next person to pick up the account starts from the last thing that was written down, which may be months old.
To estimate what this costs, count the deals or renewals you lost in the last year where nobody on the team knew the history. Multiply by the average deal value. It will be a rough figure, but it is better than leaving it at zero.
JRNY handles one part of this. Connect Gmail and the mail you send from JRNY stays on the company record, so the history sits next to the contact instead of in one person's sent folder.
Stale and duplicated data
Spreadsheets drift. People leave companies, email addresses bounce, and the same company ends up on two rows under slightly different names. The cost is follow-ups sent to the wrong person and decisions made on old information.
JRNY handles duplicates when you import an Excel file, so the move itself does not carry them across. It does not keep the data correct afterwards; that still takes a person.
Version problems
When two people edit copies of the same file, someone eventually works from the wrong one. Estimate the hours spent reconciling copies and redoing work. A CRM with one shared database removes that category of problem.
Growth
A sheet that works for a handful of clients gets harder to keep in order as the list grows, and there is no clear point where it breaks. Ask how much longer your current routine would take at twice the number of clients. If the answer is "too long", that is your cost.
Putting it together
Some of these terms will be guesses. Write the guess down and the reasoning behind it, so you can check it after a quarter.
What the move involves
JRNY imports contacts from Excel files and handles duplicates during the import, so you do not retype your existing list. Companies get a pipeline status of Pre, Hot, Cold, Signed or Closed, which replaces the colour coding many sheets use for the same purpose.
Meeting notes can be pasted in as you wrote them, and the AI extracts the contact, timeline, budget and urgency from them. Treat the result as a draft and read it before you rely on it.
The AI features need your own OpenRouter API key, and you pay OpenRouter directly. JRNY itself is free for the first year.
When a spreadsheet is still fine
A spreadsheet is a reasonable choice if you have a small number of clients and one person owns the relationships. If those stop being true, the calculation above will show it.
Frequently asked questions
What does it cost to manage clients in a spreadsheet?
It depends on your team. Add up the weekly hours spent updating the sheet, the deals lost to missing history, the time lost to wrong or duplicate contacts, and the time spent reconciling versions. The formula above gives a yearly total from your own figures.What do spreadsheets miss that a CRM catches?
Anything nobody typed in. A CRM can keep sent email on the company record and keep one shared copy of the data.When should I move from a spreadsheet to a CRM?
When updating the sheet takes real time each week, when several people edit it, or when you keep losing track of who said what to whom. With a small list and a single owner, a spreadsheet can be enough.Start JRNY, free for the first year, and import your existing sheet to compare.