“Single source of truth” is a nice slogan until your truth lives in a folder named Final, next to Final-2, next to Final-USE-THIS-ONE-Really.xlsx.
Spreadsheets start as a mercy. One tab for prices. One tab for inventory. One tab for that customer who pays in mysterious installments. You can see everything. You can change anything. You can email it to anyone.
Then the copies breed.
A sales rep updates pricing five minutes before a quote goes out. Accounting has yesterday’s file open, sees a number “that looks wrong,” and fixes it back. Someone else copies a row into another sheet because “this report needs it.” The quote goes out with the wrong price. The invoice goes out with a different wrong price. The customer asks why the numbers keep changing.
Nobody lies. Everyone touches the truth. The truth still splinters.
Spreadsheets fail in predictable ways.
1) Duplicate files become policy.
Email attachments and shared drives turn version control into folklore. If the file has ever been renamed with the word “final,” the system has already died.
2) Ownership goes fuzzy.
Who can edit the pricing sheet. Who approves changes. Who even knows the formula in cell H47. When ownership is unclear, edits become untraceable decisions.
3) Formulas turn into booby traps.
A single paste can drag formats, overwrite a lookup, or turn a working sheet into a silent liar. Excel’s error-checking helps; it also lets broken logic look tidy.
4) Copy and paste becomes your integration layer.
Pricing lives in one sheet. Quotes in another. Invoices in QuickBooks. Inventory in a third tool. Data moves through human wrists. Humans get interrupted.
5) Audit trails do not exist, or they exist as vibes.
Many teams assume they can reconstruct what happened from memory and timestamps. They cannot. Regulated industries pay real money for that lesson. The average global cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million in 2024, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report (IBM, 2024). Sloppy data handling is not the only cause, but it is a familiar on-ramp.
The sad part: plenty of small businesses already have a database that could hold steady.
A MySQL or MariaDB instance humming under a website. A back-office system someone set up years ago. A clean set of tables that rarely get touched because nobody wants to “build an app.”
Meanwhile, staff keep running the business on spreadsheets because spreadsheets have a front end. The database has a login prompt and a cold stare.
So the spreadsheet becomes the interface, the workflow engine, the permission system, the history log. It does none of those jobs well. It just does them loudly.
And widely.
Excel still matters. Microsoft reports over 750 million people use Excel (Microsoft). That number includes plenty of smart operators running real revenue through grids and formulas. Volume does not equal safety.
A practical escape route looks like this:
Keep the data where it belongs.
Give the team a safer front end.
That is the whole move.
InfoLobby turns your existing MySQL/MariaDB database into a collaborative business application. No migration. No coding.
You connect the database. InfoLobby gives you grid views, forms, and search so staff can work with real records instead of exported copies.
You create workspaces around how the business actually works. Orders. Customers. Pricing. Vendors.
You set role-based permissions. Read Only for the intern. Read and Write for sales ops. Admin for the person who has to clean up messes and deserves the power to do it.
Edits become controlled. Visible. Recoverable. A pricing change stops being a ghost story told at month-end close.
InfoLobby also supports automated workflows that fire on record changes, schedules, or webhooks. Triggers can send emails via SMTP, call REST APIs, or use OpenAI/GPT for tasks like categorization and summaries.
Spreadsheets still have a place. Ad hoc analysis. Quick math. One-off exports.
They just should not be your operational core. A business runs on decisions. Decisions need a record. A spreadsheet gives you cells. A database gives you truth that can survive Monday.