Skip to content
← Home
Discuss your task

Blog · · 9 min read

Excel, Notion or Airtable as your CRM: how far a spreadsheet goes and the signs it is time to switch

A spreadsheet works as a CRM for longer than most people expect. One person, one place where requests come in, a few dozen open deals: keep the sheet. It stops working when a second person starts typing into it, when requests arrive from more than one channel, or when nobody can say what happens to a customer next. Size is rarely the reason. Excel holds over a million rows and you will never get near that; you will run out of coordination first. A CRM in Notion or Airtable is the same story. Below: the hard limits, six signs it is time to switch, and how to move without losing a row.

How far a spreadsheet goes

Many people treat it as a question of size. It almost never is. The vendors' own help pages put the ceilings far above anything a small business enters by hand:

ToolLimit stated by the vendorWhere small businesses run into trouble
Excel1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns per worksheetSeveral copies of one file
Google Sheets20 million cells or 100 MB per spreadsheetFree-text statuses and dates
Airtable1,000 records per base on Free, 50,000 on Team, 125,000 on BusinessOn Free, the limit itself; on paid plans, the same habits as in a sheet

Airtable is the one where the ceiling can arrive early. How fast a base reaches a thousand records depends on how many enquiries you log, and it can happen sooner than you expect. For the rest, the cap sits somewhere you will never visit, so the useful question is a different one: how many people touch the file, and how many places feed it. A Trello board or a ClickUp list used as a pipeline has the same shape of problem. A card is only as current as the last person who moved it.

Notion and Airtable are better organised than a loose spreadsheet, and for one person with tidy habits they are fine. The signs below still apply, because a message reaches a base only if somebody types it in or you have built the connection yourself.

Our rule of thumb, not a law: one owner, one source of requests and fewer than thirty open deals at a time means the sheet is doing its job.

Six signs the sheet has stopped working

Count how many of these are true this week.

  1. A request arrived and never reached the sheet. It is in somebody's WhatsApp, or a missed call, or a DM answered the next morning. The sheet knows only what a person remembered to type.
  2. Two people edit the same row, or the file exists in three versions. If you have ever opened something called Leads_FINAL_v3(2), you know which one.
  3. Nobody can say what happens next with a customer. There is a status column, but no next step and no date for it.
  4. There is no history. A manager goes on holiday and their conversations with customers go with them.
  5. Nothing reminds anyone. The follow-up call happens when somebody thinks of it, and the deal that goes quiet is often the one that mattered.
  6. Counting takes an afternoon. "How many requests this month, and where from?" is a quick filter once every card has a source and a stage. In a sheet where statuses are spelled "WA", "whatsapp" and "WhatsApp", nobody asks it twice.

One or two of these: fix the sheet. Add three columns (next step, its date, owner) and sort by date every morning. Three or more, and the sheet is not the problem. If a person has to babysit it so that it behaves like a CRM, you have already hired that person to be the CRM.

You can also take a cloud CRM off the shelf and set it up yourself. That is a fair route; it is just not something we do. What we build is a small CRM around your own process, and our piece on when to build your own CRM goes through that decision in more detail.

What the same pipeline looks like in a CRM

A renovation company makes a good test, because one job touches sales, crews, materials and money at once. Stropa, a Warsaw renovation company in our portfolio, has a custom CRM built for exactly that office. A request from the website moves down the funnel (request, measurement, estimate, contract, site), and a "Next stage" button moves the card. From the surveyor's notes ("bathroom 4 m², tiles to the ceiling, riser moved") the CRM drafts an estimate, labelled as AI. The office edits it and the total recalculates.

Crews sit on a two-week schedule: you drag a job onto a crew, and clashing dates turn red. Each site shows its stages, what has been paid and what is due, and the margin as estimate minus materials minus labour. The foreman's photos arrive as a feed from his phone, view-only in the office.

DELKIND work, demo data. Stropa, a renovation company in Warsaw: a custom CRM, interface in Polish.

A sheet can hold every one of those fields. What it will not do on its own is move a card, flag two jobs for one crew on the same day, or keep the office out of the foreman's photos. You can click through the Stropa CRM in our portfolio. Once requests sit in one place, the Monday count takes a minute; we listed the six numbers worth checking every Monday separately.

How to move without losing a row

The transfer itself is dull, which is how you want it. The risky part is the week before and after, when people keep typing into the old sheet.

  1. Pick a cut-off day and tell everyone that after it the old file is read-only. Save a dated copy that same evening.
  2. Export from wherever the data lives. Notion exports a database as a CSV file, but only the current view or the default one. Airtable downloads each table as its own CSV, a whole base cannot be exported as one file, and a view with filters on will leave records out, so remove the filters first. In Airtable, attachments come out as a filename and a link that expires after a few hours; download the files themselves separately.
  3. Clean the list before it moves, not after. One spelling per status, one date format, one phone format, duplicates merged. "Marek Nowak" and "Marek N." with the same number are one customer.
  4. Decide which columns become fields. A column nobody has filled in for three months stays in the archive.
  5. Check by sample. Compare the number of customers before and after, then pick twenty at random and compare the new card with the old row: phone, last conversation, amount. Do it with the person who actually uses the sheet; they notice what is missing.
  6. Keep the old file read-only for a month, then archive it. And before you pick any CRM, ask how you get your data back out.

What to do today

  • Add three columns to your sheet: next step, date of the next step, owner. Sort by date every morning and work from the top.
  • Go through the six signs above and mark the ones that are true. Three or more, and you have your answer.
  • For one week, write down where every request came from (WhatsApp, call, form, DM) and how many never made it into the sheet.
  • Agree on five status words, write them at the top of the sheet, and let nobody invent a sixth.

If you want, we'll do it for you

We build a Mini-CRM around your process on our own engine, from €480 excluding VAT, and it takes 2–4 weeks. Our experienced specialists work faster with AI tools, so the price is lower. We fix the price and timeline in writing before we start, and you pay half once you confirm it and half after acceptance.

It starts with a free 15-minute call about how a request reaches payment in your business. The pipeline is built from that. In the price:

  • your website form and WhatsApp connected, so each request lands as a card with the contact, source, conversation history, notes, owner and next task;
  • a WhatsApp message to you and your managers about every new request;
  • roles and access: a manager sees their own requests, the head sees everything;
  • an AI reply to the customer about a new request, with a label that it is AI, and a short summary for the manager;
  • your customers and deals moved from Excel or Google Sheets and checked with you before launch;
  • message templates written for you, and training for your managers;
  • export to a spreadsheet at any time, because the data and access are yours;
  • no subscription and no fee per user: the server is registered in your name and you pay for it directly;
  • free revisions until acceptance, and bugs fixed free of charge for 6 months after launch.

If your list lives in Notion or Airtable rather than Excel, say so on the call and we will tell you how it moves. The details are on the page for a CRM built around your process.

Discuss your task

Sources

← All articles