Spreadsheets Are Quietly Breaking Expense Workflows In Small Teams

Spreadsheets are quietly breaking expense workflows in small teams

I work at Fuzen, and after talking to dozens of small teams, our team noticed that:

Spreadsheets are fine for logging numbers.
They’re terrible for approvals, ownership, and visibility.

Most teams still run expenses like this:

• Expense sent in WhatsApp

• Approval given in chat

• Entry added to Excel later

This creates three problems:

• No clear approval status

• No record of who approved what

• No single source of truth

That’s not a tooling problem.
It’s a workflow problem.

How most teams actually run expenses

This is the pattern we kept seeing:

• Expense shared in WhatsApp

• Someone replies “approved”

• Later, someone updates an Excel sheet

• Weeks later, no one remembers what happened

At first, this feels “good enough.”
But as soon as more than one person is involved, cracks show up.

Where spreadsheets fail (and it’s not about formulas)

Spreadsheets fail at the things that matter most for expenses:

• Approvals – no clear pending vs approved state

• Ownership – who approved this, and when?

• Visibility – what’s stuck, what’s done, what’s missing

• History – finding old expenses becomes painful

You don’t need advanced finance features.
You need clarity.

And spreadsheets don’t give you that.

This is a workflow problem, not a tooling problem

Most teams think:

“We need a better sheet.”

What they actually need is:

• One place where expenses live

• A clear “pending → approved” flow

• A shared view everyone trusts

Once approvals move to chat and tracking moves to Excel, the system is already broken.

What we built to test this idea

At Fuzen, we built an expense management template with a very simple rule:

If you can’t see the status of an expense in one glance, the system has failed.

The focus was not on features.
It was on workflow:

• Submit expense

• Review

• Approve

• See the status instantly

That’s it.

Why we added AI customization

One thing we learned quickly:
No two teams want the exact same setup.

• Some want categories.
• Some want filters.
• Some want simple analytics.

Instead of asking teams to:

Edit complex settings, or hire a developer; we let AI handle small changes through plain text prompts.

This keeps the system flexible without making it heavy.

Here's a recorded walkthrough of how this works, mainly for context:

My honest take

If your team is:

• Approving expenses in chat

• Tracking them in Excel

• And “fixing” issues with reminders

You don’t have an expense system.
You have a memory problem.

And memory does not scale.

What internal process are you still running on spreadsheets, even though you know it’s causing problems?