I ran an MSP for 12 years before building SPHUD. Want to know my biggest regret? Not ditching spreadsheets and other cobbled-together systems sooner.
Here are the 7 things we tracked in Excel that nearly destroyed our business:
Monthly Customer Maintenance Schedules
We had about 50 customers, each needing monthly checks. That's 600 cells to track every year. Sounds manageable until you're the one updating it every single week.
Bank holiday Monday. The tech covering that week forgot to check a client's backup. It got marked as “done” anyway—copy/paste error from the previous month. Nobody noticed.
Six weeks later, their server crashed. Last good backup? Six weeks old. They hired a recovery firm for £12K. Got most of the data back, but the trust? Gone. Contract terminated.
License Renewals
Renewal dates lived in three different places—one sheet for Office 365, another for antivirus, another for everything else. We'd set reminders, but half the time they'd get buried in someone's inbox.
Client's Office 365 came up for renewal. We forgot to reach out two weeks before. They got an email from Microsoft, saw a better deal from another MSP, and switched. We found out when they stopped paying us.
Contract Details & Coverage
“What exactly do they have with us?” should be a 5-second question. For us, it meant opening the contract PDF, the service agreement spreadsheet, and the “notes” document we kept for each client.
Client rang asking about their coverage. I fumbled through three documents while they waited on hold. Eventually found it, but I could hear the doubt in their voice. “Do you guys actually know what you're doing?”
Device Inventory
Every time a client got a new server, laptop, or printer, someone had to update the spreadsheet. Manual entry. Every single time. Obviously, this didn't always happen.
Tech tried to remote into a server that had been replaced two months earlier. Spent 20 minutes troubleshooting why he couldn't connect. Client had to explain their server was replaced “ages ago.” Made us look incompetent.
Team Task Assignment
We had a shared sheet showing who was meant to do what each month. Problem is, nobody actually checked it consistently. We'd mention it in Monday meetings, but by Wednesday, everyone forgot.
Two techs both did the same backup check for one client. Another client's check never got done at all because both techs thought the other was handling it.
Upsell Opportunities
No proper system for tracking opportunities. If a client mentioned wanting to upgrade their backup solution or add more licenses, we'd just... remember it. Or write it in the notes field. Or mention it in Slack. Or forget entirely.
Three different clients mentioned wanting to upgrade their backup over the course of a quarter. I remembered one of them. The other two bought solutions from other providers because we never followed up.
Customer Contact Information
We'd store the main contact in one place, IT contact in another, accounts contact somewhere else. When someone left the company, we often didn't find out until something broke.
Client's main contact left their company. We kept sending invoices to their old email for two months. Payments got delayed. When we finally realized, we looked disorganized and unprofessional.
The Breaking Point
We were wasting at least 15 hours every week managing these spreadsheets. And that's assuming everyone actually checked them, which they didn't.
One evening, I was updating the monthly tasks spreadsheet for what felt like the thousandth time, and I thought: “What if there was a system that just... did this for us?”
That question became SPHUD.
It took a year of tinkering—three complete versions, in fact. We'd build something, use it in our own MSP, find what didn't work, and rebuild it. Version 3 is what finally clicked. It's been running in our business for months now, and it's solved every single one of these problems.
One dashboard. Everything visible. No more hunting through spreadsheets. No more copy/paste errors. No more missed tasks that cost us clients.
And now I want to share it with the world. Because if we were struggling with this, I know other MSPs are too.
If you're still using spreadsheets for customer management in 2025, I get it. We did it for years. But you're leaving money on the table—and probably losing clients you don't even know about yet.