What Spreadsheets Do Small Businesses Actually Use (And How to Keep Them Simple)

Most small businesses don’t start with “data”.

They start with a notebook.
Or a few numbers written on a phone.
Or a rough spreadsheet someone set up late one evening just to keep things moving.

That’s normal.

If you’re running a small business, you don’t wake up thinking about reports or dashboards. You’re thinking about customers, invoices, stock, jobs to finish, and whether there’s enough money coming in this month.

If you want a gentle, non-technical explanation of what “business data” actually means, start here.

So let’s strip this right back.

What spreadsheets do small businesses actually use?

In reality, most small businesses only use two or three spreadsheets, even if they think they’re using more.

The most common ones I see are:

An income and expenses spreadsheet
A simple customer or job tracker
Sometimes a basic stock or order list

That’s it.

No complicated formulas.
No fancy charts.
Just somewhere to write things down so nothing gets forgotten.

And honestly? That’s a good starting point.

The income and expenses spreadsheet

This is usually the first spreadsheet a business creates.

It might include:

Date
What was sold or paid for
Money in
Money out

Some people track this weekly. Others update it once a month. Some only look at it when their bank balance feels tight.

The goal isn’t perfection.
The goal is visibility.

If you are unsure what else is worth tracking beyond money in and money out, this guide breaks it down clearly.

If you can see roughly what’s coming in and going out, you’re already doing better than many businesses.

If this is where you’re starting, you might also find this helpful: https://grifflepop.com/essential-sme-kpis/

The customer or job tracker

This often appears next, especially for service-based businesses.

It’s usually a simple list:

Customer name
Job or service
Status (quoted, booked, completed)
Amount charged

This spreadsheet helps answer questions like:

Who still needs invoicing?
What work is coming up next week?
Which jobs are finished but unpaid?

Again, nothing fancy. Just something to stop everything living in your head.

Where spreadsheets start to feel painful

Spreadsheets aren’t the problem.

How they grow is.

What usually happens over time:

Copies get made instead of updating one file
Numbers don’t match between sheets
Someone changes a formula and doesn’t realise
You’re not quite sure which version is the latest

If you are already in this stage, these reporting mistakes are usually what is causing the pain.

At this point, spreadsheets stop feeling helpful and start feeling risky.

If that sounds familiar, you might recognise some of the signs in this post: https://grifflepop.com/need-a-dashboard/

What spreadsheets are still good at

Despite their limits, spreadsheets are brilliant for:

Getting started quickly
Keeping costs low
Testing what you actually need to track
Learning what matters in your business

For many small businesses, spreadsheets are not “wrong”.
They’re just doing too much heavy lifting.

This is where people often jump straight to software they don’t really need yet.

When it’s time to tidy things up

You don’t need to throw everything away.

Most businesses I work with already have the right data. It’s just:

scattered
duplicated
hard to trust

Often the next step is simply:

one clean version of the truth
fewer files
clearer structure

Sometimes that stays as a spreadsheet.
Sometimes it becomes something more visual.

If you’re curious about what that next step can look like, this explains it in plain English: https://grifflepop.com/what-is-business-intelligence

The key takeaway

If you’re running a small business, you don’t need dozens of spreadsheets.

You need:

a few that you actually update
numbers you can trust
a setup that saves time instead of stealing it

Everything else comes later.

If you’d like help tidying up what you already have, or figuring out what’s worth tracking and what isn’t, you can learn more about how I work here: https://grifflepop.com/services/

For a broader look at how spreadsheets are commonly used in business, Microsoft also outlines typical use cases here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/excel