MarineIT / By situation / Coming off spreadsheets
Excel · Outlook · a shared drive
The spreadsheet is not wrong. It is just alone.
Credit where it is due
Why your estimator is better than most software.
The question is not whether the spreadsheet is good. It is whether it can see anything outside itself.
Where it genuinely stops working
When there are three of them. Chartering's estimate, operations' running position and finance's actual, maintained separately, reconciled monthly, and never quite agreeing.
When the author leaves. The workbook survives; the reasoning does not. Nobody wants to touch a formula they did not write, so it calcifies.
When the market moves faster than the file. A benchmark pasted in on Monday is wrong by Wednesday, and nobody has time to repaste it.
When a claim depends on it. A laytime calculation in a workbook, with the evidence in four mailboxes, is very hard to defend two months later.
The honest cost
Four things Excel cannot do, and one it should not have to.
None of these are failures of the tool. They are things no spreadsheet can do, because a spreadsheet has no access to anything but what you type into it.
It cannot read your inbox
Every figure in it was typed there by a person reading a circular in another window. That transcription is where the working day goes, and where transposed drafts and dropped tolerances come from.
It cannot know the market
A route comparison requires someone to look it up and do the arithmetic. Done properly on the fixtures that matter, done in someone's head on the rest, and not recorded either way.
It cannot check the vessel
Loadability against draft, TCP and stowage factor is a separate exercise against separate sources. Which means it happens on the estimates you have time for.
It cannot hold the evidence
The NOR, the statements of fact and the correspondence around a delay live in mailboxes. The calculation is in the workbook. Assembling the two, six weeks later, is where recoverable money is written off.
And the one it should not have to do
Be the system of record. A workbook is an excellent instrument for thinking with — for testing a scenario, for working out what a counter is worth, for a calculation nobody has automated. It is a poor place for the only copy of what your firm agreed.
That is the actual switch being proposed here: not giving up the spreadsheet as a tool, but stopping it from being the only place the truth exists.
Moving across
Your spreadsheets come with you.
Nobody starts from an empty system. The workbooks holding your vessel list, your counterparties and your past fixtures are years of accumulated knowledge, and they import rather than being re-typed.
Import what you have
Vessel records, counterparties, past voyages and standing assumptions come in from the spreadsheets you already keep. What moves is agreed before anything starts.
Your assumptions stay yours
Standing figures for bunker prices, port costs, waiting time and speed are yours to set and adjust — the same defaults that live at the top of your workbook today.
Every figure still opens
The reason a desk trusts its own spreadsheet is that you can click any cell and see the formula. Every number here opens the same way, to its inputs and their sources.
How a move runs
Nobody migrates a desk in a weekend.
Any vendor promising that is describing a demo rather than a deployment. The sequence below is how it actually goes.
Runs alongside
The feed sits beside your existing mailbox. Nobody stops using Outlook, nothing is switched off, and the desk sees what parsing and deduplication do to a real morning. If it is not useful, you have lost nothing.
Estimates in parallel
Run new estimates in both, on the same cargoes, and compare. This is the part that decides it — either the numbers agree and the parsed inputs save you the typing, or they do not and you should know why.
New voyages only
Voyages fixed from that point run here. Existing ones finish where they started. No migration event, no cutover weekend, no period where nobody knows which file is current.
History, when useful
Past voyages carry benchmarking and counterparty history worth importing. Worth doing eventually; not worth blocking a start on.
Worth being blunt about
When you should stay on spreadsheets.
If you fix a handful of voyages a year, one person handles the whole chain end to end, and your inbox is manageable, a workbook is genuinely the right tool. The overhead of any system will exceed what it saves you.
The switch starts paying when more than one person touches a voyage, when circular volume is beyond what anyone can read properly, or when a claim has already been lost for want of evidence. If none of those apply yet, we would rather say so now than sell you something you do not need.
Signals it is time
Two people maintain the same numbers. Reconciliation is now a recurring task rather than an occasional check.
You are reading the same cargo repeatedly. Circular volume has passed the point where a person can discriminate reliably.
A claim failed on evidence. The calculation was right and the file was not.
Handover requires a conversation. Nobody can pick up a voyage without asking the person who fixed it.
Book a demo
Bring the workbook.
Genuinely — send us your estimator and a voyage you have run through it. We will build the same estimate here and compare them line by line. If ours is worse, that is worth both of us knowing.
We reply within one business day. Anything you send is deleted after the session.