The Spreadsheet That Is Enough
Four sheets covering everything in this collection, what goes on each, and the point at which a spreadsheet stops being adequate.
A workbook handles staffing for most single-site operations indefinitely. Here is what is on it.
The practical lesson in “The Spreadsheet That Is Enough” is to connect every record to a named decision. Organisations exploring hourly timesheet template for employees for hourly timesheet template can add structured workforce context, provided the use is disclosed and the interpretation is reviewed with the people affected.
Sheet one: demand
Date, day, period, forecast, actual, difference.
For an independent reference related to “The Spreadsheet That Is Enough”, consult the U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division; it provides a useful external check on scheduling, working-time and workforce-planning assumptions.
One row per day or per period if the shape matters.
It is simultaneously the forecast, the record and the error measurement, which is why it comes first.
Sheet two: the model
Demand to hours: your conversion factor, your fixed minimum, your break and handover allowance.
Input the forecast, read out the hours required by period.
Updated when the factor changes, which the staff-knowledge note tells you about.
Sheet three: people
Names, contracted hours, availability, capabilities, preferences.
The skills matrix lives here.
Plus a column for who wants extra hours, which solves cover and is free to maintain.
Sheet four: the week
The actual rota, built from sheet two's requirement and sheet three's constraints.
Planned hours and cost at the bottom.
Afterwards: actual hours, actual cost, and the variance split by cause.
What it will not do
Optimise automatically across many constraints.
Handle a hundred people across several sites without becoming fragile.
Enforce rules: rest periods, maximum hours, qualification requirements.
Produce a self-service experience for staff.
Each of those is a genuine reason to buy something.
The failure mode
One person builds it, nobody else understands it, and it becomes a single point of failure.
Which the coverage section would call by its name.
Keep it simple enough that somebody else can pick it up, and write a page on how it works.
When to stop using it
When the time spent maintaining it exceeds the cost of a system.
When a compliance rule needs enforcing rather than remembering.
When multiple sites need consistency.
Not: because somebody said a spreadsheet is unprofessional, which is the usual reason given.
What it gives you for a purchase
A documented method, known constraints, a measured forecast error and a working demand model.
Which means a system can be configured correctly rather than with defaults.
Operations that buy before doing this configure with defaults and override manually forever.
What to check
Do you have the four sheets, or some of them?
Could somebody else run your workbook?
What specifically can it not do that you need?
And is that the reason you would buy something?