Tally vs spreadsheets: when it’s time to switch
Spreadsheets are wonderful. Here are the signs you have outgrown one, and an honest comparison.
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Almost every Tally customer started with a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are wonderful: flexible, free and understood by everyone. For many teams they are the right tool for a long time. This guide helps you decide when they stop being enough, and what you lose and gain when you switch.
When spreadsheets are enough
If you have fewer than a few hundred customers, if your key numbers come from one place such as your payment system, and if one person owns the numbers and updates them weekly, a spreadsheet is probably fine. Do not switch because a blog post, including this one, tells you to.
Signs you have outgrown it
You copy and paste every week. If someone spends an hour every Monday exporting data and pasting it into tabs, that is an hour a week you are paying for numbers that are already out of date.
You cannot answer "why". A spreadsheet tells you that sign-ups went down. It does not tell you which step of the sign-up form people abandoned, or whether it happened on mobile only.
Two people have two answers. When the marketing sheet and the product sheet disagree about last month's active users, and nobody knows which is right, you have a trust problem, not a data problem.
It breaks when someone is away. If the spreadsheet only works when one person updates it, it is a single point of failure.
The day we switched was the day two founders brought two different revenue numbers to the same board meeting.
A Tally customer
What you gain and lose
| Spreadsheet | Tally | |
|---|---|---|
| Free to start | ✓ | ✓ |
| Works with any data you can paste | ✓ | ✗ |
| Updates by itself | ✗ | ✓ |
| Funnels and retention cohorts | ✗ | ✓ |
| Answers "which users did this?" | ✗ | ✓ |
| Custom formulas for anything | ✓ | ✗ |
| Shared definitions everyone trusts | ✗ | ✓ |
| No setup at all | ✓ | ✗ |
We are honest about the ✗ in our column. Tally cannot do everything a spreadsheet can. It is built to answer questions about what people do in your product, and to answer them the same way every time.
A sensible way to switch
You do not have to move everything at once. The teams that switch most smoothly do it in three steps.
- Start with one question. Pick the question you answer most often in the spreadsheet, for example weekly active users, and answer it in Tally for a month, next to the sheet.
- Compare the answers. They will be different. Find out why. Usually the spreadsheet counted something differently, and the discussion about which definition is right is valuable in itself.
- Retire one tab at a time. When the team trusts the new number, delete the tab. Keep the spreadsheet for the things it is good at: planning, finance, one-off analyses.
What it costs
Tally's free plan covers up to 10,000 events a month, which is enough for many early products. Paid plans start at $29 a month. The bigger cost is the setup: adding tracking to your product usually takes a developer half a day, and deciding what to track takes a team meeting. Both are worth doing carefully.
Our honest advice
If your spreadsheet works, keep it. If you recognise two or more of the signs above, try a tool for one question, next to the spreadsheet, for a month. You will know by the end whether it is worth switching.
Two common worries
"We will lose our history." You will not, if you are careful. Keep the spreadsheet as it is. It becomes the record of your first months, and it stays useful for comparing long-term trends. Tally starts counting from the day you add tracking, and after a few months, the new history is the one you use.
"Nobody will look at a new tool." This is the real risk. The answer is to put the new numbers where people already look. Scheduled reports can send them to your team chat every Monday, in the same place the spreadsheet link used to be. Most teams stop opening the spreadsheet on their own within a month.
What customers say after switching
We asked twenty customers who moved from spreadsheets what they missed. The most common answer was "the freedom to add any column". The second was "nothing". And the most common thing they said they gained was time: on average, three hours a week that used to go into exporting, pasting and checking. For a small team, that is almost half a day, every week, for the rest of the year.
