Using Excel as a CRM? Here's What You're Missing (And What It's Costing You)

You’ve got a spreadsheet with customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, and maybe a “Notes” column where someone typed “spoke to Karen, send quote” three months ago. The quote was never sent. Karen went with a competitor. Nobody knows.

This is the Excel CRM. Almost every small business runs one at some point. A contacts list that slowly accumulates columns — “Last Contacted,” “Quote Sent,” “Job Status,” “Follow Up” — until it becomes the de facto system for managing customer relationships. And for a while, it works well enough that nobody questions it.

The problem isn’t what the spreadsheet contains. It’s what it can’t do.

What an Excel CRM Actually Looks Like

If you’re honest, your customer spreadsheet probably has some combination of:

• Contact details — name, phone, email, address, maybe a company name
• A status column — “Lead,” “Quoted,” “Won,” “Lost,” or some variation
• A notes column — free-text field where people dump everything from phone call summaries to personal reminders
• Date columns — “Date Added,” “Last Contact,” “Follow Up Date”
• Maybe some financial data — “Quote Amount,” “Invoice Total,” “Lifetime Value”

It’s all there, in one flat table. And as long as you’re the only person using it and you’ve got fewer than 100 customers, it genuinely does the job. You scan the list, spot who needs a follow-up, make the call, update the notes. Simple.

The cracks appear when the list grows, when more people need access, and when the relationships become complex enough that a single row can’t capture them.

The Follow-Up Problem

This is the one that costs you the most money, and you’ll never know how much.

In Excel, a follow-up is a date in a cell. Maybe you’ve added conditional formatting so it turns red when the date passes. That’s your reminder system — a cell that changes colour in a spreadsheet you might not open today.

There are no notifications. No alerts. No “you have 3 follow-ups due this morning” when you start your day. The follow-up only exists if you actively look for it. And when you’re busy — which is always — looking at the follow-up column drops to the bottom of the priority list.

Every missed follow-up is a potential lost sale. Not because the customer said no, but because you never asked. They were interested, you were meant to call on Thursday, Thursday got away from you, and two weeks later they’ve solved the problem with someone else.

The Pipeline Visibility Problem

How many active quotes are outstanding right now? What’s your pipeline worth? What percentage of leads convert to customers? How long does it take on average from first contact to signed deal?

In a CRM, these answers are one click away. In Excel, they require someone to manually filter, count, and calculate — assuming the data is accurate and consistently formatted, which it probably isn’t.

Without pipeline visibility, you’re running your sales blind. You don’t know if you’ve got too many leads and not enough capacity, or too few leads and a revenue gap coming in three months. You can’t forecast. You can’t identify bottlenecks. You can’t see which types of work convert well and which don’t.

Most businesses using an Excel CRM don’t realise they’re missing this visibility until they get it for the first time and wonder how they ever managed without it.

The Activity History Problem

A customer calls. They’re unhappy about something that was discussed with a different team member two months ago. You open the spreadsheet, find their row, and look at the notes column: “14/12 — spoke re: quote, needs to check with partner.”

That’s it. That’s the entire recorded history of this customer relationship. Who called whom? What was quoted? Were there emails? Was there a site visit? Did someone promise a callback? Nobody knows, because the notes column is a single cell containing fragments of context from multiple interactions, written by different people with different ideas about what’s worth recording.

A proper CRM logs every interaction as a separate, timestamped record — calls, emails, meetings, quotes, notes. When that unhappy customer calls, you can see the complete timeline of every touchpoint they’ve had with your business. You don’t have to ask colleagues what happened or piece together the story from memory.

The Multi-User Problem

When two salespeople share a customer spreadsheet, you get conflicts. Both talk to the same lead without knowing the other already reached out. Both update the same row with different information. One person’s formatting breaks another person’s filters.

In Excel, a customer belongs to whoever opened the file first. There’s no concept of assigned leads, territory management, or workload balancing. There’s no way to see “show me all leads that haven’t been contacted in 7 days across the whole team.” There’s no way for a manager to spot that one rep is sitting on 40 leads while another has 12.

This doesn’t matter when you have one salesperson. It matters enormously when you have three or more — and the bigger the team, the worse the problem gets.

Do You Need a Custom CRM or an Off-the-Shelf One?

Good question. If your sales process is relatively standard — leads come in, you qualify them, send a quote, follow up, close or lose — then an off-the-shelf CRM like HubSpot, Pipedrive, or Zoho will serve you well. Many have free tiers that are more than enough for small teams.

Off-the-shelf works when you’re prepared to adapt your process to the tool. Most businesses can, and should.

Custom makes sense when:

• Your sales process is tightly linked to operations — quoting feeds into job scheduling, which feeds into invoicing, which feeds into reporting. A standalone CRM creates another data silo.
• You have industry-specific requirements — trades businesses, property managers, and professional services firms often have workflows that generic CRMs handle awkwardly or not at all.
• You need the CRM to be part of a larger system — customer data that flows seamlessly into project management, inventory, or field service tools without manual re-entry.

Getting More Out of Your Excel CRM Right Now

If you’re sticking with Excel for now, make it work harder:

• Add a “Next Action” column — not just a follow-up date, but what you need to do. “Call to confirm scope” is more useful than “Follow up.”
• Sort by follow-up date daily — make it your first task each morning. Sort, filter for today’s date or earlier, work through the list. The discipline matters more than the tool.
• Standardise your status values — use data validation dropdowns instead of free text. “Lead,” “Quoted,” “Negotiating,” “Won,” “Lost” — whatever stages match your process. This makes filtering and reporting possible.
• Keep notes structured — instead of dumping everything in one cell, use a format: “22/02 — [Name]: Called, discussed scope for warehouse fit-out. Sending quote by Friday.” Date, who, what. Every time.
• Review lost opportunities monthly — filter for “Lost” status, read the notes, and ask why. If the answer is consistently “we didn’t follow up in time,” that’s your signal.

A spreadsheet can hold customer data. What it can’t do is actively help you manage relationships. The difference between a customer list and a CRM is the difference between a filing cabinet and an assistant — one stores information, the other reminds you to act on it.