AN HONEST COMPARISON

The spreadsheet is free. Here's what it actually costs.

We're not going to pretend Excel doesn't work, we ran client renewals on it for years, and for a while it did. This page is what we learned about where it stops.

One account we managed, a multi-entity manufacturer, around thirty branches, not a huge business by national standards, ran on a workbook with seven tabs. Sixty-plus domains across twenty country registries. Thirty firewalls in eight different renewal cohorts. Microsoft licensing across three agreement types. Dell warranties by service tag, including production servers whose cover, the sheet quietly recorded, had expired years earlier and never been resolved. The exchange-rate question was literally row two.

And the IT lead who owned it told us the number that changed how we think: his biggest partner saw about 22% of his IT budget. He was managing fourteen partners, each with their own slice, each needing its own budget build, and the only complete picture of his obligations was that hand-built file.

The spreadsheetRenewals360
First warningWhenever someone opens the fileFive months before, automatically
OwnershipWhoever's name is in column FNamed owner + escalation contact, enforced with windows
When the owner is on leaveNothing happensIt escalates
The quote, PO and invoiceThree inboxesOne record, matched
Exchange-rate exposureA guess made at budget timeRevalued daily at spot
Budget seasonThree weeks of rebuildingA snapshot, an uplift, an export
When the manager resignsThe knowledge leavesThe record stays
Audit trailTrack changes, sometimesEvery action, attributed, always
Bought through a cloud marketplaceNobody external is watching at allTracked the same as everything else
Cost“Free”From R2 499/month

The honest maths: one auto-renewed Microsoft commit at last year's seat count, or one uncovered server failure, costs more than a year of Renewals360. The spreadsheet isn't free. It's just unbilled.

Retire the spreadsheet in 48 hours.