Sometimes the spreadsheet
is the correct answer

Not every business needs a data platform, and pretending otherwise wastes people's money. The threshold is not about company size, it is about a few specific conditions.

Three conditions, and you probably need at least two

More than a handful of sources that have to agree with each other. One system is a reporting problem. Five systems that disagree about the same customer is a platform problem.

More people needing numbers than can be served by asking one person. When the analyst is the bottleneck and the queue is measured in days, the queue is the thing costing you money.

A need to know what was true in the past, not just what is true now. Regulatory, contractual, or simply that decisions have to be reviewable.

What a spreadsheet is genuinely good at

It is fast, everyone can use it, it needs no infrastructure, and the person who owns it can change it in a minute without a ticket. For a single source and a small team, nothing beats it and the alternatives are worse.

The failure is not that spreadsheets are bad. It is that they stop working silently, and the point where they stopped is only visible in hindsight.

The signals that you have crossed the line

Different people quote different figures for the same thing. The monthly close depends on one person being available. Somebody maintains a file that combines exports from three systems by hand. Nobody can reproduce last quarter's number.

One of those is normal. Three of them together is a platform conversation.

Starting small without starting badly

If you are over the line but only just, the answer is not a large programme. It is the narrow version: the sources that actually disagree, raw history kept from now on, the few metrics people argue about defined once.

That is a small amount of work and it is the same shape as the large version, which means growing into it later does not mean starting again.