3 reasons to move your OOH business from excel to software

“We need a dedicated outdoor advertising media system!”

“There are so many Excel sheets, I can’t keep up with them all!”

“What’s my current media availability?”

“Can you share that Google Sheet with me again? I can’t find it anywhere!”

“Are we sure this data is accurate?”

“There has got to be a better way to manage our out-of-home business.”

Have you found yourself thinking one of these things or something like it? Maybe you’ve even said these things out loud to your team. We truly feel your pain!

There’s nothing worse than knowing you need a better system and simply not knowing where to start or even have the time to put something together because you’re just trying to keep up. 

Maybe you’ve thought that there really isn’t another option and your entire outdoor advertising business with a mix of static and digital inventory has to run on Excel or Google Sheets. The truth is, if your entire business is running on a spreadsheet, it may be time to consider one dedicated platform for all your OOH business processes.

Spreadsheets are bad for your business. Ready to find out why?

1. You can’t afford all the mistakes

According to Market Watch, up to 88% of spreadsheets contain errors. If you think about it, it’s not really that surprising they’re compiled by humans after all.

Spreadsheets make it easy to create errors, a simple mistake like misplacing a decimal point can result in huge errors in accounting. Meanwhile, Excel has no way of checking whether all the figures match with real results. Excel is simply a medium to contain your data and doesn’t permit analyzing the information in depth.

The situation’s made worse by the tendency of the out-of-home advertising businesses to rely on manual data entry. Employees copy and paste media sites information from one spreadsheet to another, and merge records together. Each of these processes has the potential to introduce errors to spreadsheets and will end up costing your business lots of money.

Interesting Read: You want to increase your sales? Say no tOOH spreadsheet

So what’s the alternative?

Using OOH web-based software, Edge1 means that your records are updated instantly. You completely avoid the danger of cut-and-paste errors. Since everyone in your company has access to the same information, you don’t have to spend time wondering if there’s a newer version of your spreadsheets stored on someone else’s computer.

Online spreadsheet tools ensure that you always have the latest data in front of you as there’s only one version of the document.

2. Getting accurate insights is difficult

Advertising business relies on insights from patterns and trends to recognize opportunities and reduce costs. 

Which stage of a process is my client’s campaign running?

Which lead is due-to follow? 

Which media locations are most profitable? 

You want answers to these kinds of questions. If your out-of-home advertising business data is stored across multiple spreadsheets, you have to work very hard to draw insights from your data.

With Edge1 Outdoor Media Management Software you no longer need to scroll through dozens of different Excel spreadsheets looking for vital information. Instead, you can find it all with just a few clicks.

Interesting Read: Are your competitors growing in a much faster way than you? Want to know what you can do differently to win over them?

3. You waste hours of time each month

Microsoft Excel started as a tool, meant to improve business efficiency. It’s certainly a nice upgrade from handling your company’s accounting and data on paper. But is the spreadsheet method still relevant today?

With Edge1 Software, you can collect your data and generate a financial analysis report, a sales report, or an overview of the budgets, in a few clicks. You no longer need to apply complex Excel formulas to calculate your media occupancy percentage or track sales performance.

The best way to quickly get an overview of your business’s performance is to get an Edge1’s Business Intelligence Dashboard.

Edge1 is Better to manage your OOH Advertising Business!

If you’ve run into these barriers and experienced the frustrations we outlined above, it might be time to consider Edge1. We’d love to help you! It all starts with a completely free demonstration session. Schedule one anytime, right here.