Despite their ubiquity in business operations, spreadsheets are notoriously error-prone, often leading to costly and damaging consequences. From manual entry mistakes to hidden miscalculations, the risks are well-documented and far-reaching.
The most common reasons for mistakes are:
- Manual data entry mistakes
- Lack of validation
- Complex formulas and hidden miscalculations
- Lack of version control
No one is immune to spreadsheet failures, from financial institutions to government bodies, notorious high-profile examples have led to financial losses and data breaches.
High-Profile Spreadsheet Failures
Íslandsbanki Share Sale Error (2022)
A spreadsheet formatting mistake caused Íslandsbanki, a state-owned bank in Iceland, to sell shares below value. [1]
Cambridge NHS Trust Data Breach (2023)
The NHS Trust in Cambridge disclosed two data breaches involving over 22,000 patients’ records. The issue stemmed from accidentally exposed data embedded in a pivot table within Excel spreadsheets.[2]
Why Purpose-Built SaaS Software Is a Better Choice
For teams managing sensitive or mission-critical information like claims, cloud-based SaaS software provides better reliability, access control, and automation than spreadsheets ever can.
Many businesses resort to spreadsheets when starting new processes, including claims management. However, the limitations of spreadsheets quickly reveal themselves and make for a less than ideal choice when it comes to managing claims.
Whether you manage claims for a client or you just need to record claims that occur as part of your day-to-day business activities, a spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets, may seem like a quick solution but this choice will harm your productivity in the long run.
While spreadsheets can be effective reporting tools, they **have limitations when it comes to collaboration and managing the complexities of claims—especially as the volume of claims increases. **
For this reason, adopting claims management software, like Claimable, earlier in the process can help you avoid complications later on.
Claimable is a claims management system designed to help claims professionals improve operational efficiency while ensuring customer satisfaction.
Below, we outline some of the shortcomings of using spreadsheets for managing claims and explain how Claimable can address these challenges.
Spreadsheet challenges and how Claimable can address them
Claims overview and access to information
👎 Spreadsheets: You can't easily get a complete claims overview. Information readability is limited that requires awkward scrolling from left to right.
✅ Claimable provides a clear claim lifecycle overview and claims information is easy to retrieve
Claimable provides you with an easy way to see all your claims categorised by certain characteristics and along with the information you care about.
In Claimable you can click on a specific claim and easily get a snapshot of the claim lifecycle and any additional claim data, notes and documents.
Claims data storage and accessibility
👎 Spreadsheets: Documents and emails need to be stored elsewhere, such as a shared folder which is hard to maintain and quickly becomes messy.
✅ Claimable allows you to save documents, notes and emails under each relevant claim
In Claimable, documents and emails are saved under each relevant claim. This means you can easily locate claims data and past communication and satisfy data protection requirements.
Claims efficiency - tasks and reminders
👎 Spreadsheets: You can't record tasks and receive reminders, a separate tool for this purpose is often used.
✅ Claimable improve your workflow thanks to the claim checklist and tasks reminders
Claimable allows you to automatically populate the Claim Checklist with tasks that you repeat for every claim (Repeating Tasks) and add ad-hoc to-dos. Claimable will also automatically remind you of any due or overdue task every morning around 8 am, your local time.
Claim-focused approach
👎 Spreadsheets: Spreadsheets are a general tool not built for purpose.
✅ Claimable puts claim experience first
Claimable is specifically designed and built with claim experience and productivity in mind, providing tools to make the claim process faster.
Security and compliance
👎 Spreadsheets: Spreadsheets are vulnerable to data breaches and lack advanced security controls when shared.
✅ Claimable adopts security by design
Claimable implements security-by-design and offers various security functionality for data access control that satisfy regulatory requirements and maximise your data security.
Data sharing
👎 Spreadsheets: Sharing data externally requires a cumbersome exporting process and risks the mess of multiple versions floating around. The data shared is not live, but only a snapshot of what was saved on the day of exporting.
✅ Claimable makes claim collaboration easier and secure
In Claimable you can grant clients and suppliers external access to live data in order to collaborate or review a specific group of claims, so everyone sees the same version. Access can be revoked at any time and the ability to perform certain activities can be reduced to a minimum or even read-only.
Consistency of data and claims communication
👎 Spreadsheets: Manual errors and data inconsistencies are common and difficult to avoid.
✅ Claimable automatically populates emails and documents
Claimable helps you keep consistency by automatically pulling information from the claims, contacts and companies into your Emails and Letters.
Notes and descriptive info
👎 Spreadsheets: Notes are often stored in separate documents. Adding descriptive notes into a spreadsheet cell makes following the claim timeline difficult and error-prone
✅ Claimable allows you to keep a clear track of notes and comments
Claimable's Notes functionality allows you to add as many descriptive notes as needed, presently neatly under each specific claim. Notes are time-stamped, easily searchable and can be exported.
