Personal CRM vs a spreadsheet: when the spreadsheet is fine

Plenty of people run their network from a spreadsheet, and for plenty of them it is the right answer. It is free, it is portable, you already know how to use it, and nobody can take it away or raise its price. Any honest comparison starts by admitting that a spreadsheet does most of this job adequately.

What a spreadsheet does well

• Holds names, companies and notes in a format you fully control.
• Sorts and filters, which covers a lot of what you actually want to ask.
• Exports to everything, because it is already the lowest common denominator.
• Costs nothing and has no account to lose.

Where it breaks: the date arithmetic

The first failure is that a spreadsheet does not tell you anything. It stores a last-contacted date; it does not compare that date against the interval you wanted for that person, sort the result, and show you the five names that need attention today. You can build that with formulas — people do — but you are now maintaining software, and the maintenance falls on exactly the week you are too busy to do the outreach.

This matters more than it sounds. The difference between a record of your network and a system that prompts you is the difference between knowing you should reach out and actually doing it.

Where it breaks: the logging friction

The second failure is that updating a spreadsheet after a conversation requires opening a spreadsheet after a conversation. That sounds trivial and it is fatal. The habit survives only if logging takes seconds and happens where you already are — on your phone, right after the call. When logging is a chore, the last-contacted column goes stale, and once it is stale every other column is decorative.

Where it breaks: the merge problem

The third failure arrives when the same person exists in your phone, your email account and your LinkedIn export with three spellings and two addresses. Reconciling that by hand is miserable, and doing it repeatedly as those sources change is not realistic. This is dull, mechanical work that software is genuinely good at and humans are genuinely bad at.

A reasonable rule

Stay with the spreadsheet if your list is under about fifty people, it comes from one source, and you are honestly keeping the dates current. Move when any of those three stops being true — most often it is the dates.

If you do move, take the spreadsheet with you: any decent tool imports a CSV, and a tool that cannot is telling you something about how it views your data. A.R.O imports CSVs with a review step before anything lands, and exports back out whenever you want — see contact data privacy on why that matters more than it seems.

Worth testing before you commit either way: export your LinkedIn connections and run them through the free analyzer. It shows how many people are actually in there, the duplicates, and who you have drifted from — all in the browser, nothing uploaded.

The middle option nobody mentions

You do not have to put everyone anywhere. A spreadsheet of 400 contacts you never look at, plus deliberate attention on 40, is better than either extreme. Whatever tool you pick, the list that earns its keep is small. What is a personal CRM makes the case for starting with thirty names.