CRM vs. Excel: What Exactly Makes CRM Better Than Spreadsheets

1. Tracking Clients and Deals

One spreadsheet is not enough for managing sales. In practice, companies use multiple spreadsheets separately for clients, leads, deals, and other data. These spreadsheets gradually fill up, become confusing, and end up lost in folders or email threads. Since the data is interlinked, salespeople constantly need to keep several spreadsheets open or switch between different sheets.

The advantage of a CRM is that all information is stored in one place and easily accessible. It also allows you to capture details that there’s simply no room for in a spreadsheet without losing clarity.

For each client, you can track:

• basic information,
• address,
• value of the business relationship,
• documents and contracts,
• contacts,
• and most importantly, the history of all communication, offers, and orders.

For each deal, you get an overview of:

• how many deals you currently have in play and their total value,

• what stage they’re in and who’s managing them,
• and what needs to be done to move each deal forward.

And because a CRM is built specifically for salespeople—unlike Excel—it’s clearer and easier to navigate. From a calendar event, you can jump to the deal, from the deal to the client, and from the client to a specific offer — everything is interconnected.

2. Automating Routine Tasks

One major drawback of Excel is that you have to manually copy all the information into it from other sources. This makes working with Excel more time-consuming compared to CRM, which automates a large portion of these routine tasks.

Here are a few examples:

• When adding a new client, just enter the company name into the CRM and the system pulls most of the data from the ARES register and fills it in for you.
• When creating an offer, the client's header and the selected products are automatically generated into a PDF.
• You can send the offer to the client directly from the CRM without opening an email application.
• Everything you create in the CRM (such as an offer) is automatically linked to the client, the deal, and other relevant records — no need to re-enter the same information.

3. Client History and Deal Context

Tracking the history of clients and deals in Excel is very difficult — as the amount of information grows, it quickly becomes overwhelming. Trying to get a clear view of a client’s history in Excel would take a lot of time and involve digging through spreadsheets, emails, and folders full of documents.

While you can log leads in a spreadsheet, there’s likely not enough space to note who called them, when, and what was discussed. To find out whether a lead is still relevant or already dead, you’d have to ask your colleagues in person.

In a CRM, you can see everything you’ve been through with each client — from sent offers and all email and phone communication, to every purchase, complaint, or product the client showed interest in.

This allows your colleague to check the CRM at any time and quickly understand the client’s history. And before a meeting, you can easily refresh your memory about everything you’ve ever dealt with regarding that client.

For more on which customer information is worth tracking, see our dedicated article.

4. Integration with Other Tools

Both Excel and CRM can be integrated with other office tools. The difference is that Excel isn’t primarily a sales tool, so most of the available integrations don’t actually make sales work easier.

With a CRM, you can integrate, for example:

• an invoicing app,
• a project management tool,
• a bulk email sending platform,
• or an e-shop.
  
  

You can send invoices for completed deals directly from the CRM, track the success of email campaigns for each client, or have e-shop orders automatically imported into the CRM.

5. Reporting

Creating reports in Excel requires manual setup of functions, macros, and charts. Alternatively, you might calculate figures from spreadsheets using a calculator — but there’s no time for that in sales. And all it takes is one typo by a team member to break a formula, rendering your reports unreliable.

CRM, on the other hand, generates reports automatically in clear, colorful charts. It can show you, for example, a sales funnel where you instantly see how many deals are in each stage of the process and how much revenue they could bring in. You can just as easily filter for last quarter’s profits or forecast income for the upcoming months.

Whether you’re managing sales in spreadsheets or a CRM, don’t forget to track your key performance indicators.

6. Document Storage

You can’t upload documents to Excel — but you can in a CRM. If you’re managing clients and deals in spreadsheets, you’ll have to store documents separately in folders or an online drive.

In a CRM, you can not only upload offers, invoices, or contracts, but also create them directly within the system — and in some CRMs, even sign them electronically with the client. In the contact database, you’ll see exactly which documents have been signed with each client and open them with a single click.

7. Field Use

Excel does have a mobile app, but it works pretty much the same as the desktop version. A mobile CRM, on the other hand, comes with extra features specifically designed to make work easier for salespeople in the field.

In a mobile CRM, you’ll find features like:

• navigation to client locations,
• uploading photos from meetings,
• voice-to-text note dictation,
• business card scanning,
• and quick note entry.

8. User Permissions

In a CRM, you can set user permissions based on specific roles and needs. For example, salespeople can see only the deals they’re working on and only the features they need for their job. This makes the CRM interface clearer and more focused for each user.

Excel doesn’t offer these options. While it is possible to restrict access to individual documents, doing so requires complex sorting of files and folders according to access rights — which often results in a confusing and disorganized file system.

Try a CRM Before You Switch

Although CRM is a powerful sales tool compared to spreadsheets, don’t dive in headfirst. Start by testing a demo version to see firsthand which processes it simplifies and how.

For example, you can try our Raynet CRM free for 30 days with no obligations.