Where would you rather keep your most valuable investments? In a duct-taped box or in a secure vault? When you’re working with important information, you want it easily accessible, but you wouldn’t want it scattered in different places or held together by paperclips.
Your organization’s most important investment — your people — shouldn’t be managed with a quickly-created, fallible system either… and spreadsheets aren’t strong enough for dealing with such a crucial part of company success.
Spreadsheets are flexible, familiar, and cheap, so most growing teams have used spreadsheets to track everything as they’re getting started. Tasks like PTO, budgets, and to-do lists are the perfect fit for spreadsheets. For a while, spreadsheets can work for compensation, too, especially when your team is small and your org chart is simple.
But eventually, they break.
While your company grows with more people, more roles, more managers, and more locations, spreadsheets start to show their cracks. They become slow, error-prone, and nearly impossible to scale. The bigger the stakes, the riskier it gets. And when it comes to compensation, the stakes are high. If you're still relying on spreadsheets to manage pay, here’s why it might be time to consider how to level up your spreadsheets by shifting to a dedicated compensation platform (like BetterComp!).
As you weigh your options, I’ve gathered 5 Reasons Why Spreadsheets Don’t Cut It for Compensation Management.
Let’s start with the basics: spreadsheets are fragile. It only takes one copied formula, one bad paste, or one missed row to create a mistake — and the bigger the spreadsheet, the harder it is to spot. With 94% of business spreadsheets containing critical errors, mistakes are fine if you’re tracking lunch orders, but they aren’t fine when you're managing employee pay.
An incorrect salary range, miscalculated bonus, or outdated benchmark can lead to a major misstep for employee pay and could impact the longevity of your overall compensation strategy. Market pricing platforms can help your team:
The truth is, it’s hard to trust a system you’ve outgrown. And when your people are relying on you to get pay right, trust matters.
If your team is scaling, your compensation tool needs to scale too. Even the most simple updates like refreshing benchmarks, adjusting salary ranges, or pulling compensation summaries for a manager can take hours when working with a spreadsheet. And as headcount grows, so does the time burden.
HR and comp teams in mid-market companies often spend significant amounts of their time cleaning and formatting data, building version-controlled models for different departments, and fielding questions from recruiters and managers.
The time spent on these tasks could be invested on more strategic work like refining your pay philosophy, improving internal equity, or enabling managers to have better conversations about compensation.
A dedicated compensation platform automates the manual parts, so your team can focus on the big picture.
Compensation isn’t just an HR concern, it’s a team sport! Recruiters need to know where to start offers. Managers need to see what’s fair for their team. Finance needs data to budget and forecast. Leadership wants visibility. With spreadsheets, collaboration gets clunky fast. You’re emailing versions back and forth, chasing down last-minute edits, or dealing with conflicting information, and when you finally “lock the spreadsheet,” someone still has a copy they’re referencing anyway. With a clean, all-in-one compensation platform like BetterComp, everyone works from the same source of truth. You can set roles, permissions, and workflows that make collaboration secure and simple.
Today’s compensation programs are more dynamic than ever. Growing teams see an emergence of multiple job levels and families, geographic differentials, promotion and adjustment policies, and equity considerations. As more compensation complexities arise,
spreadsheets struggle to keep up. The information becomes overwhelming and every exception adds another layer of risk.
Compensation platforms are purpose-built to handle complexity without creating chaos. You can price jobs, build salary ranges, apply geographic adjustments, and maintain internal consistency, all without needing to debug cell B47.
Even when you have all the numbers, it can be difficult to explain the why behind your compensation strategy. Compensation platforms help you share rationale behind salary ranges, show how market benchmarks were selected, and visualize equity and pay band distribution without flipping through spreadsheet tabs. Consistent, clear data with visibility into your decision-making builds trust within your HR team, across leadership, and with employees.
BetterComp was built for compensation teams who’ve outgrown spreadsheets. It gives you the tools to manage compensation without spending hours wrangling data. With BetterComp’s dynamic market pricing software, you can use modern market data to price jobs quickly and accurately and reduce manual work by eliminating errors and collaborating in one system.
You don’t need a 10-person comp team to get started. BetterComp is designed for lean HR and People teams who need to do more with less—and want to build a foundation that supports growth.