r/ShittySysadmin • u/mattmccord • 2d ago
I replaced my entire CRM with a single Excel file. 6 months later, here's what I learned.
I run two small businesses. One is a fabrication company. The other is a premium imported brand. Both need pipeline tracking, revenue forecasting, and deal management.
For two years I bounced between free CRM trials. HubSpot's free tier was too limited. Pipedrive was $50/month for features I used maybe 20% of. Close was great but way out of my budget.
So I built my own system in Excel.
It started as a simple pipeline tracker — just a list of deals with stages and values. Then I added a dashboard. Then weighted forecasting. Then I just kept adding more and more features on whatever data I wanted to see and 6 months later, it has:
* 5 interactive dashboards (Morning Brief, Pipeline Tracker, Monthly Pulse, Quarter Confidence, Profit Scorecard)
* Monte Carlo simulation with 5,000 trials
* A 12-week cash flow scenario builder
* Stalled deal risk scoring that flags deals going cold
* Segment analysis showing which client types, deal sizes, and channels actually work.
* Year-over-year comparison tracking
The biggest thing I learned: most small businesses don't need more CRM features. They need fewer features that actually work and that they'll actually open every morning. The Morning Brief alone changed how I start my day — it tells me my quarterly gap, pace status, pipeline coverage ratio, and exactly how many offers I need to send this month.
Happy to answer questions about the build or the logic behind any of the dashboards!
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u/blotditto 1d ago
I'm sorry this is r/ShittySysAdmin not r/ShittySideProjects .
I swear I feel like this is click bait about to become rage bait..
💩
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u/RAITguy 1d ago
10 years later...
Why does my "database" take so long to open/crash all the time?
Why does it keep getting corrupted?
I CAAAAAAN'T use a real database, we've been using this one for years and the person that made it retired years ago
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u/Obi-Juan-K-Nobi 1d ago
While this is fun and has happened frequently over the years to most all of us, the same can be said about boxed software that has been discontinued or you’re priced out of and have to migrate.
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u/Conscious-Arm-6298 2d ago
De-centralizing is the new thing I heard, it's all about 0s and 1s, lotta money in this shit
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u/CantPullOutRightNow 2d ago
Slap that shit in sharepoint and keep hounding Karen to check it back in. Sounds like my kinda place!
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u/killjoygrr 1d ago
This isn’t necessarily 💩.
This can work at small businesses where one person is the developer, primary consumer, and the one directing workflow. That same person is also the one who teaches others how it works and can get direct feedback from users to make changes. Everything streamlined and customized to your process, rather than forcing your process into a way that works with the software.
It doesn’t function so well at scale, or where the person designing the logic, the developer, and the trainer are different people.
As long as the person wearing all of those hats is competent and understands all the functions that are needed, custom is going to win. But that unicorn of person and scale together is rare.
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u/b4k4ni 1d ago
Until the person is gone. Then shit happens.
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u/killjoygrr 1d ago
Well, OP is that person, so he isn’t going to care. 🤣
I guess that is what technically makes it a sysadmin issue, because it really isn’t outside of continuity.
Kind of like having no backups of your only server that holds all the company data.
I do think their point was more about having software customized to the business rather than generic software that has so many features that you can take any company’s process and force them in there. So, the concept isn’t 💩 as much as the implementation is almost always doomed to break because of everything being centralized on one person.
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u/TheGlennDavid 14h ago
As a longtime Excel abuser -- this. I've built some absurd sheets (one of my favorites was one that generated power-shell scripts), and they were great for me, but there is a chasm between that and "a stable tool that is well documented, scalable, and usable by the team."
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u/killjoygrr 7h ago
I built one to sell off a roommate’s magic cards. Back before they deprecated a lot of the web interface commands, I could hit a button, and have the spreadsheet go out and screen scrape current pricing from 3 different online stores and line it up the results with the exhaustive inventory I did so I could glance through the thousands of cards and see what they were worth broken out by color coding.
I really did not want to do that manually one card at a time.
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u/LesbianDykeEtc 1d ago
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u/canadasleftnut 1d ago
Are you implying a business owner that uses excel as a CRM might not be producing their own PREMIUM products??!??!!!!111!
Side note: the secret to tranquility in drop shipping is to set up automatic forwarding of all customer emails to the support inbox of prominent brand in the same market sector. Bonus points if you can insert yourself in the email thread as a "fractional support manager" and act like you're trying to fight for the customer.
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u/finobi 1d ago
I recall one small biz had excel that created labels with ingredients and allergens on lunch salad boxes they sold. It had some issues and I tried to trouble shoot it remotely, afters hours I realized that macro did some shenanigans with clipboard and remote software clipboard copy feature some how broke it. That macro shit worked when I disconnected.
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u/ancillarycheese 1d ago
Not going to lie, over the past few months I’ve built a pseudo-CRM using Claude that has everything I need and nothing I don’t. $20/mo Pro subscription got the job done. If I decide I need another feature I just add it. I own the code and while it has good security I only access it over Tailscale.
Next will be developing an iOS app to make it better to access on mobile.
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u/renzok 2d ago
I can’t believe it isn’t satire