When spreadsheets become business infrastructure

Spreadsheets earn their place. They are fast, familiar, and honest about being unfinished. That is why they absorb so much of a company's real work: they fill the gap between how the business actually operates and what the paid software was set up to do.

The trouble begins when the workbook stops being a sketch and becomes the system. Permissions are informal. History is a file name. Two people edit at once and the truth splits. A formula no one remembers starts making decisions.

At that point you do not have a spreadsheet problem. You have an infrastructure problem that happens to be wearing a spreadsheet.

The way out is not to ban spreadsheets. It is to notice which ones have become operational intake, assignment, inventory of work, money movement and give those jobs a proper home, with automation on the paths that repeat.

Keep spreadsheets for analysis, modelling, and the edges. Do not ask them to be the company.