The Spreadsheet Business Tools Checklist: What You Actually Need

Most small businesses own too many tools and not enough spreadsheets

A typical small business in 2025 pays for a finance app, a CRM, a project manager, an inventory tool, and an invoicing service — five subscriptions, $150–$400 a month, and at least two of them are barely used. The uncomfortable truth is that four of those five jobs can be done by a well-built spreadsheet, and the fifth can be done by a spreadsheet-powered web app. This is the checklist.

Each item below is a real business function, not a nice-to-have, with what the spreadsheet needs to do and a Completo product we'd actually recommend. Run it as a quarterly audit: if you're missing one, that's a gap; if you're paying a subscription for one, that's a leak.

The five core spreadsheets

1. Finance tracker — tracks income, expenses, accounts, and ideally net worth. The non-negotiables are a 12-month rolling view, automatic categorization, and a dashboard that updates without manual refresh. If your finance 'tool' is a once-a-quarter bank export, you don't have a finance tracker; you have a cleanup project.

2. CRM — contacts, deals, follow-ups. A spreadsheet CRM is the right answer for any solo operator or team under five. Beyond that you may want dedicated software — but for the first $50K–$200K of revenue, a sheet beats a $49-per-seat-per-month CRM every time. The non-negotiable is a follow-up date column that surfaces what's overdue.

3. Inventory — stock levels, reorder points, supplier history. Skip if you sell services or digital products; otherwise it's mandatory. Excel handles larger SKU counts better; Google Sheets works for under ~2,000 SKUs.

4. Project tracker — tasks, milestones, status. The temptation is Asana or Monday; the reality is that 95% of small teams need a status column, a due date, and an overdue view. A spreadsheet tracker takes ten minutes to learn and removes the third subscription from your stack.

5. Invoice generator — generates, numbers, and tracks invoices. The classic approach is a Word template you copy-paste, which is how duplicates and missed numbers happen. The modern approach is a spreadsheet-powered web app: pick a client, pick line items, generate a numbered invoice, write it back to a tracking sheet.

The audit

Run this checklist against your current stack. For each item: do you have it, is it actually being used, are you paying a subscription for it? If yes to the third and 'barely' to the second, that's a $20–$50/month line item you can replace with a one-time purchase. Do that five times and you've cut $100–$250/month from your burn — and you own the tools forever.

The goal isn't to run your business on spreadsheets. The goal is to stop paying rent on software a spreadsheet can replace.

A small business with these five spreadsheets — finance, CRM, inventory, projects, invoices — has the operational backbone of a company twice its size, for a one-time cost around $170. The same backbone as subscriptions costs upwards of $150 every month, forever. The checklist is short. The savings compound.