It did not start with twenty spreadsheets.
It started with one.
A few years earlier, the business was much simpler.
- One marketplace.
- A manageable product range.
- A small team.
Every Monday, someone downloaded the latest reports, updated a spreadsheet and shared the numbers with management.
It was not perfect.
But it worked.
“The spreadsheet was never the problem. Growth changed everything around it.”
Then the Business Started Growing.
- First came more products.
- Then more orders.
- Then Germany.
Expanding into another marketplace brought new customers and new opportunities. It also brought new questions.
- How was Germany performing compared with the Netherlands?
- Which products needed more stock?
- Was advertising performing differently in each market?
- How should the management team compare everything?
The quickest answer was usually simple.
Create another spreadsheet.
And at first, that worked too.
- One file became three.
- Three became seven.
- Then came France, Italy and Spain.
Without anyone planning it, the business was building an entire information system one spreadsheet at a time.
Five Marketplaces. Twenty Different Files.
By this point, every team had developed its own way of working.
- Sales had its reports.
- Advertising had campaign data.
- Operations had inventory files.
- Finance had its own numbers.
- Management had a weekly summary.
- And then there were copies of copies.
Nobody had deliberately created a complicated system.
Every file had been created to solve a genuine business problem.
But eventually, the business owner started asking a simple question.
That was when the real problem became visible.
“Can I get one clear overview of how the business is performing?”
The Same Question. Three Different Answers.
The management meeting was scheduled for Monday morning.
The business owner asked:
- Operations gave one number.
- Finance gave another.
- The marketplace team had a third.
Nobody was wrong.
Nobody was hiding anything.
They were simply looking at different files, updated at different times, using slightly different definitions.
Suddenly, the business had a bigger problem than spreadsheets.
It had a trust problem with its own information.
How can management make a confident decision when the first step is deciding which number to believe?
“How much inventory do we actually have?”
The Monday Report That Took Two Days to Prepare.
The problem was not only accuracy.
It was time.
Every week, skilled employees were spending hours downloading reports, copying data, checking formulas and combining information from different marketplaces.
- Monday's report often started on Monday.
- Sometimes it was not truly finished until Tuesday.
- Or Wednesday.
By then, the business had already moved on.
- A stock issue may have changed.
- Advertising performance may have shifted.
- A product may have started slowing down.
The information was useful.
But it was arriving too late.
“The company was paying skilled people to move information from one place to another instead of helping management understand what it meant.”
“Why are we preparing this report manually every single week?”
The Product Nobody Realised Was Becoming a Problem.
The product did not suddenly fail.
There was no dramatic drop in sales.
No major alert.
No single report that said:
- Sales were slowly declining.
- Returns were gradually increasing.
- Advertising costs were moving upward.
Each signal looked small when viewed separately.
But together, they told a different story.
The problem had been developing for months.
“Something is wrong.”
“The problem was not invisible. The signals were simply scattered.”
The Spreadsheet Everyone Was Afraid to Touch.
Every growing business seems to have one.
The spreadsheet.
- The one with hundreds of columns.
- Complex formulas.
- Hidden tabs.
- Maybe a script written years ago.
- Only one person really understands how everything works.
And when that person goes on holiday, everyone else suddenly becomes very careful.
- Nobody wants to delete a column.
- Nobody wants to change a formula.
- Nobody is entirely sure what will break.
But it was never designed to carry that responsibility.
“At some point, the spreadsheet quietly stopped being just a spreadsheet. It became a critical business system.”
When Growth Creates More Work Instead of Less.
The company continued to grow.
- More people joined.
- More responsibilities were divided between teams.
But instead of reducing complexity, growth sometimes created even more of it.
- More people meant more handovers.
- More handovers meant more emails.
- More emails meant more versions of files.
- More versions meant more checking.
The business was growing.
But its internal processes were struggling to keep up.
The problem was not a lack of effort.
In fact, the opposite was often true.
People were working extremely hard.
They were simply working around systems that no longer fit the size and complexity of the business.
The CEO Wants an Answer Now.
Eventually, the business owner asks a question that should be simple:
But answering it is not simple.
- Someone needs to download marketplace data.
- Someone else needs to update advertising.
- Operations needs to check inventory.
- Finance needs to validate costs.
- Then the numbers need to be combined.
By the time the answer arrives, the question may already have changed.
And this is the real cost of disconnected systems.
It is not only the hours spent in spreadsheets.
In e-commerce, that delay can matter.
“What happened last week, and what should we do next?”
“It is the time between asking a question and being able to act on the answer.”
The Moment the Business Stopped Creating More Spreadsheets.
Eventually, someone suggested creating another file.
- A new master spreadsheet.
- A better version.
- A more advanced report.
And for the first time, the business owner stopped.
The business needed to step back and ask:
- Where does the data come from?
- Who needs it?
- How often should it be updated?
- Which decisions depend on it?
- What should be automated?
- What should be connected?
- What information does management actually need?
That conversation changed everything.
“The problem was not that the company needed spreadsheet number twenty-one.”
“How should information actually move through our business?”
Where Menko Services Comes In
Start With the Business Problem.
This is where Menko Services Pvt Ltd can support growing e-commerce businesses.
The starting point is understanding what the business is actually trying to solve.
For one business, the problem may be hours of manual reporting every week.
For another, it may be marketplace data sitting in different places.
For another, it may be a spreadsheet that has become too important for the business to depend on.
And for another, it may simply be that management cannot get a clear answer quickly enough.
Depending on the situation, Menko can support businesses with:
- Data integration and centralisation
- Reporting and business intelligence
- Process automation
- Marketplace and API integration
- Custom internal tools and software
- Dedicated data and technology expertise
“The technology is not the starting point. The business problem is.”
Back to Monday Morning.
The story ends where it began.
- Another Monday.
- Another management meeting.
The business owner asks:
But this time, the meeting does not begin with people searching for the latest version of a spreadsheet.
The first thirty minutes are not spent collecting numbers.
The team can focus on the questions that actually matter.
That is the difference between simply having data and being able to use it.
“How are we doing?”
“What happened? Why did it happen? What should we do next?”
One Business. Five Marketplaces. Twenty Spreadsheets.
The spreadsheets were never really the problem.
They were simply a sign that the business had grown faster than the systems supporting it.
For growing e-commerce businesses operating across Europe, complexity does not usually arrive all at once.
It arrives one product, one marketplace, one employee and one spreadsheet at a time.
Eventually, the business reaches a point where keeping everything connected becomes just as important as growing the business itself.
“That is where better data, automation and technology can make a practical difference.”