The signature is the bottleneck, not the spreadsheet

A back-office process that everyone agrees is slow almost always has a spreadsheet in it, and the spreadsheet almost always gets the blame. It is the most visible part, it looks amateur next to real software, and replacing it feels like progress. So the conversation starts at "which system should we buy" and never gets to why the process was slow.

Claims are the clearest example. Staff email a photo of a receipt to a shared inbox. Someone prints it, walks it to a manager, gets a signature, keys the amount into a sheet, and passes the sheet to finance at month end. Ask how long a claim takes and you will hear a number in days. Ask where the days go and the sheet is not the answer.

Two things are actually slow

Approval that has to happen in a building. A signature on paper means the queue moves at the speed of somebody being at their desk. One manager on site, one week of travel, and every claim behind them waits. No software you install underneath that changes it, because the constraint is physical.

Status that lives in one person's head. If the only way to answer "where is mine" is to open the inbox and scroll, then every person who wants an answer costs the admin team an interruption. The work is not just the processing, it is the reporting on the processing, and the second one is invisible until you count it.

Replace the spreadsheet and leave those two alone, and you get a nicer looking process that takes the same nine days.

The order that works

Move approval into a rule before you move anything into a system. Routed by type and amount, with a named approver and a named deputy, is usually enough. A rule can be written on paper first and tested for a fortnight before a line of code exists.

Then give the thing a reference and a status the requester can see for themselves. Not a dashboard, a status. The moment somebody can check without asking, an entire category of work disappears from the admin team's day.

Only then is it worth asking what the process should run on. By that point you know what you actually need, which is usually far less than the suite you were about to buy for every seat in the company.

How to tell which one you have

Take the last twenty claims, tickets, approvals, whatever the queue is made of. For each one write down the moment it arrived and the moment it was approved, and then the moment it was paid. If most of the elapsed time sits between arrival and approval, the tool is not your problem and buying one will not help. If it sits after approval, you have a different problem, and it is probably in finance rather than in HR.

Twenty rows in a spreadsheet will tell you which. Which is a fair use for a spreadsheet.