It's time for us all to admit that, as a society, we've asked spreadsheets to do too much.

Today's nonprofits are typically running as lean as possible, financially speaking. They can't always afford to invest in all of the tools they need. This means spreadsheets are likely holding everything from their finances to their member list, or anything else that will fit in the cells.

Using the wrong tool for the job can be very costly, even if that tool seems to be doing the job well enough. Think of it this way: You can use a butter knife to loosen a screw. However, if you have to use the same butter knife to loosen 1,000 screws, it's not efficient.

With that in mind, here are a few ways that spreadsheets could be killing your nonprofit.

Mistakes Happen... a Lot

It's estimated that about 90% of the spreadsheets out there have some sort of error in them.

Sometimes these mistakes are benign and go unnoticed. However, a simple copy and paste error can lead to something like a donor's credit card being charged the wrong amount, or an entire sub-section of your mailing list missing out on an event notification.

When these mistakes happen, the first step is often looking for new tools and new ways of doing things. However, it's obviously better to stay ahead of these mistakes by finding a tool like Wild Apricot to handle your organization's high-complexity and high-value data.

Collaboration is an Issue

Excel was never built with more than individual number-crunching in mind. Collaboration tools have been added to it and Google Sheets over the years. But the experience is still not quite where you need it to be.

Again, you're far better off finding another solution that is designed to collect and centralize your information, while making it easily accessible for different team members.

The Learning Curb

The average employee arrives with a very basic knowledge of how to use a spreadsheet. They know how to enter information and perform some basic calculations.

However, once you have to train a new team member on how to do a VLOOKUP or IFERROR in Excel, you're likely asking too much from the program and the employee. 

The more time and effort you have to spend trying to train your staff on the procedures and data that you have shoehorned into Excel, the more likely it is you're using the wrong tool.

A Lack of Mobile Functionality

Have you ever tried to use a spreadsheet on a smartphone? You most likely tapped around a few times and then said, "I'll do this when I get back to my laptop."

Can you open a spreadsheet on a mobile phone? Yes. Can you do much more than that? No. Trying to make crucial changes to a spreadsheet while pinching and zooming can be cumbersome and lead to costly errors.

How much are spreadsheets costing your organization? It's hard to tell. One spreadsheet typo cost Kodak $11-million a few years ago.

A mistake at your end likely won't be that expensive. However, the more people you have using and relying on spreadsheets for critical data, the more costly any given mistake could be.

Don't wait for a mistake to happen. Find a solution that can actually work for you today!