Spreadsheets vs Procurement Software: When Is It Time to Switch?

Quick answer: A well-kept spreadsheet, or the purchase order feature in your accounting package, is enough while one or two people buy, the owner approves everything personally and purchases are few. It is time to switch when several people raise or approve purchases, approvals live in chats you cannot search, quotes sit in many places, or you struggle to answer an accountant's or auditor's question about a past purchase. At that point, look for a simple tool that covers requests, approvals, purchase orders, vendors and budgets, sets up without consultants and has a free way to start.

Spreadsheets are not the problem; scale is

A familiar setup in Nigerian small businesses is WhatsApp plus Excel: a request arrives as a voice note or message, the owner replies "approved", and someone adds a line to the purchases sheet. That is a reasonable system. It costs nothing extra, everyone already knows how to use it, and at low volume the owner sees every naira leave the business.

The trouble starts as the business grows. More people request, more people approve, and the sheet becomes the place where several people's memories of WhatsApp conversations are typed up after the fact. For a business owner, the cost shows up as money spent that nobody can explain. For a finance officer, it shows up as a purchase line with no evidence of who asked, who approved and which quote it was based on.

Two pieces of guidance are worth knowing before you decide.

Spreadsheet errors are normal, not careless. Raymond Panko, a University of Hawaii researcher on spreadsheet errors, summarised the research for the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group (EuSpRIG) in 2015: errors are rare in any single cell, but in large spreadsheets at least one wrong bottom-line figure is very likely; errors are very hard to find; and the people who build spreadsheets are highly overconfident about their accuracy. That research covers spreadsheets in general, not purchase logs in particular, but a purchase sheet has the same weak points: totals, copied formulas and manual typing.

Professional accountants say to check whether a spreadsheet is the right tool. The ICAEW (the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales) publishes twenty principles for good spreadsheet practice. Principle 4 warns that a lot of time can be wasted, and errors caused, by using a spreadsheet when another application would be more appropriate, and one of its examples is using a dedicated software package for well-established processes such as bookkeeping. In our view, purchasing, with its fixed steps of request, approval and order, is that kind of process once volume grows.

A small example of how a sheet goes wrong (illustrative)

A catering company in Port Harcourt keeps one purchases sheet per month. One month, the monthly total is a SUM formula over rows 2 to 41, written when the month started. Five more purchases are added below row 41 later in the month, worth ₦1,185,000 together. The sheet still shows ₦6,240,000 for the month; the real figure is ₦7,425,000. Nobody did anything careless: the formula simply did not grow with the list.

The ICAEW principles cover exactly this case (design formulas so that adding rows needs no change) and recommend built-in checks, peer review, version control and access protection. If you stay on spreadsheets, apply them. If keeping them up becomes a job in itself, that is a sign.

Signs it is time to switch: a checklist

Count the statements that are true for your business today. This is our rule of thumb, not a standard: at two or fewer, a tidy spreadsheet is probably still fine. At three or more, it is worth trying a tool alongside the sheet.

• More than two people raise purchase requests, or more than one person approves them.
• Approvals are given in WhatsApp, by phone or in person, and you could not quickly show who approved a given purchase.
• Requests regularly come back for missing details (quantity, budget, a quote).
• Quotes are spread across email, WhatsApp photos and paper, and you cannot always find the one a purchase was based on.
• There is more than one copy of the purchases sheet, or people argue about which version is current.
• Someone has left the business and their purchase history left with their phone or inbox.
• You find out a department has overspent only after the money is gone.
• Your accountant, auditor or a donor has asked for evidence behind a purchase and it took days to put together.
• You cannot say what you spent with a particular supplier last quarter without searching chats and files.

None of these is a disaster on its own. Together they mean the sheet is recording what happened, but no longer controlling it.

Why the record matters, not just the money

If you run a registered company in Nigeria, record keeping is also a legal duty. As enacted in 2020, the Companies and Allied Matters Act (CAMA) requires every company to keep accounting records sufficient to show and explain its transactions, including day-to-day entries of money received and spent and what it was spent on (section 374). Those records must be kept for six years from the date they were made, and a company may keep electronic copies alongside original hard copies, giving thought to the security of the hardware and software it uses (section 375). The Act is about accounting records in general, not purchase requests specifically. This is general information, not legal advice: check the current Act or ask your accountant what your business needs to keep. The practical point stands: a purchase you cannot explain later is hard to defend, whatever tool recorded it.

What a small business actually needs from a tool

A small business does not need everything a large organisation's purchasing system does. It needs a short list done well. Use this table to compare whatever options you look at.

Two cautions. First, a tool does not fix an unclear policy: decide who may approve what before you configure anything (see Who Can Approve What?). Second, keep the switch small: start with one department and new purchases only, rather than migrating years of old sheets.

How RequisitionPro helps

You do not need software to buy well, and some businesses will rightly stay on spreadsheets. If the checklist above described you, RequisitionPro is one option built for this stage, and the Free plan is free forever, so you can try it with real requests before deciding.

Difficulty: requests and approvals live in different places. RequisitionPro keeps them in one connected flow. A requisition is raised on a four-step form (Basic Info, Items, Attachments, Review), with quotes attached; it goes through the approval workflow set up for its department, where each step names a person or a role; and once approved, a purchase order is created from it with the items carried over, then sent to the vendor, acknowledged and completed in the app. The benefit is one record from request to order instead of a chat, a sheet and a separate PO.

Difficulty: nobody can see the whole picture. The dashboard in the screenshot below shows total requisitions, their value, the amount approved and pending approvals, with spending by department and the split of requisitions by status. A Company Admin can also set a budget for each department; approved requisitions count against it, and when one passes its warning or critical threshold (75% and 90% by default) an alert appears on the Budget Management page.

Difficulty: you still want your spreadsheets. Company Admins can generate the reports shown above as Excel files or as a printable PDF view, so analysis can stay in Excel while the requests and approvals live in one place. Each requisition keeps its approval trail, and an audit log records requisition and user activity, so the history does not depend on anyone's phone.

What it does not do. RequisitionPro does not replace your accounting software and does not connect to it. It does not record goods received, match invoices or make payments; those stay with your finance team and accounting tools. Request for Quotation (RFQ), for collecting supplier quotes, is available on paid plans only. The web app works in a phone browser; there is no separate mobile app.

Where to see it: the "RequisitionPro Onboarding" video (3:06) on the tutorials page shows the setup from start to finish.

Related questions

Can I just use my accounting software's purchase order feature? Often, yes, especially if one person raises orders and the owner approves them. Check whether it also records the request and the approval that come before the order, or only the order itself.

Should we move our old spreadsheets into the new tool? Usually not. Keep the old sheets as an archive (for companies, remember the six-year retention in CAMA) and start the tool with new requests from a set date.

Is WhatsApp approval good enough? It can be at low volume, if the approval is clear and you save it with the purchase record. It becomes weak when approvals are scattered across several people's phones, or when the person who approved leaves. For organising requests before they reach approval, see How to Organise Purchase Requests.

Next step

Read the onboarding guide to see each setup step, from your company profile and departments to approval workflows, vendors and your first requisition, before you decide to switch.