28 August 2009
Spreadsheets Are Terrible, But We Still Use Them
Posted by articleranks under: Money .
We’ve all used them, spreadsheets, whether it’s to do a simple list of items, or whether you are looking to create advanced sums for business forecasts. Although they are not really good enough for our uses, we still manage to put up with them. No doubt this is because they come free with our operating systems and the majority of people prefer to put up with a free one instead of buying a new one.
Although spreadsheets have their downsides, they do have advantages and are useful for a number of uses. The biggest pluses is that they can manage simple calculations, create graphs using the data, and create easy to manage business forecasts. These all come in handy for certain jobs. However, because of the amount of downsides they have, they aren’t useful for tasks like tracking your companies’UK fixed assets.
Despite it sounding like a very good tool for storing asset data, it’s just not as complex as anasset tracking software UK package.
Up until a point, asset management can live with a spreadsheet, however, once you wish to start storing more assets and keeping more data about each item, the spreadsheet quickly becomes useless.
Here are some features you should look out for when buying an asset management software suite.
- It must be able to store enough information for your use. Even though the amount of data a spreadsheet can store is enough for some tasks, in asset management it tends not to be. The data that’s stored may not provide enough detail.
- It must be able to reflect the structure of the company, no matter how complex. If there is an asset that can be placed in a number of categories within a business, a simple spreadsheet will not be able to reflect this complex structure.
- They should be able to be restructured quite easily. As soon as a spreadsheet becomes complex, it’s hard to modifity and data and the structure of it.
- They must be able to manage different price depreciation levels on seperate items. If different assets had been bought at different stages, but they were connected, like a computer and a keyboard. The software should be advanced enough to calculate a range of price depreciation factors.
- It should be able to cope with re-lifeing of assets. If an asset is assessed and found to be useful, the depreciation level must be altered as the asset is now useful.
- The software should be able to create structured data reports. It’s not easy to create a structured data report using a spreadsheet.
That was a list of a few features that any asset management software suite should come with. Plus it’s why a standard spreadsheet package is not suitable for storing company asset data and adding the data to afixed asset register.
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