Safety obligations managed with Excel remain the everyday practice in many companies and HSE consulting firms.
No one sets out to build a safety management system on a spreadsheet: you get there by accumulation. One file for training deadlines, another for PPE, a third for periodic inspections.
As long as risks and obligations stay limited and straightforward, this kind of management can be enough. Complexity, though, doesn’t necessarily depend on a company’s size: even a business with few employees can have a lot to manage, if its activities involve different risks and require numerous compliance obligations. As the information to track grows — deadlines, people involved, sites — the files stay the same, but holding it all together becomes increasingly difficult.
At that point, the question is no longer whether the spreadsheet is a valid tool. It’s about understanding whether the tools in use are still adequate for how complex the management has become.
The topic is covered in full in Why Most Companies Still Manage Workplace Safety in Spreadsheets (And What It Costs Them), by Emanuele Sandri, co-founder of 4HSE.