Excel is not the villain in this story. It is a genuinely good tool that is very good at a specific job, calculations, small lists, quick analysis, and a genuinely bad fit for a job it quietly ends up doing anyway at a lot of Kenyan organizations: acting as the permanent system of record for an entire operation with dozens of staff, several locations, and years of accumulated history.
Even Kenya's Tax Authority Is Having This Moment Right Now
If it feels like admitting your organization still runs on Excel is an embarrassing thing to say out loud, it is worth knowing that the Kenya Revenue Authority itself is reported to be replacing its long-standing Excel-based tax return filing system with a web-based platform, moving to auto-populated returns using data it already holds instead of asking taxpayers to fill in downloadable spreadsheets. If the institution responsible for the country's entire tax system is having this exact reckoning, an NGO, SACCO, or hospital group quietly running its own operations the same way is in very ordinary company, not a uniquely disorganized one.
Why Excel and Email Work Fine at First
None of this means adopting Excel and email early was a mistake. For a small team, they are close to ideal: cheap, flexible, familiar, and fast to set up without needing anyone technical involved. The problem is not that these tools were chosen. The problem is that nobody ever consciously decided to keep using them once the organization had grown five or ten times past the size they were originally adopted for, it simply never came up as a decision to make.
What Breaks First as You Grow
The first thing to break is usually version control, in the informal sense. Once more than a handful of people are editing copies of what is meant to be the same spreadsheet, small conflicting edits creep in quietly, and nobody notices until two departments report different numbers for the same thing in the same meeting. The second thing to break is approvals living inside email. A request sent for sign-off is easy to lose in an inbox, easy to forget, and impossible to track properly, so nobody can honestly say how many approvals are sitting untouched at any given moment. The third, and often the most expensive, is that there stops being one single, trustworthy source of truth. Everyone has their own copy, their own version, their own slightly different number, and reconciling them becomes a recurring, unpaid part of someone's job.
The Real Cost Is the Reconciliation, Not the Software
The actual cost of staying on Excel and email past the point where they fit is rarely the software itself, since it is often already paid for either way. The real cost is the hours spent every week cross-checking one spreadsheet against another, chasing an approval that went quiet, or manually assembling a report that a properly connected system would have produced automatically. That time is invisible on a budget line, which is exactly why it tends to go unaddressed for years longer than it should. If you recognise your own organization in this pattern, our piece on signs your organization has outgrown its current system covers the broader picture, and our business systems and automation service is built around fixing exactly this kind of gap without requiring you to replace everything at once.