Tracking a strategic plan in a spreadsheet is free.
That is what everyone tells themselves. The software is already paid for, nobody has a purchase order to get approved, no line shows up in the budget. Tracking costs zero dollars.
It costs hours. A great many hours, taken from the most expensive people in the organization, and they appear nowhere because nobody adds them up.
Let us do the arithmetic once. The numbers below are mine, drawn from a mid-sized organization with seven departments. They are not yours. Run the calculation with yours, that is the whole point of the exercise.
The arithmetic, in hours
First line item: asking. One person chases seven departments, four times a year. Writing the request, tracking who answered, chasing the three who did not, answering questions about the expected format. Three hours per round. Twelve hours a year, purely to ask.
Second line item: answering. Each department spends two hours per round. Finding where they left off, checking with two team leads, converting all of it into percentages. Seven departments, four rounds, two hours. Fifty-six hours.
Third line item: consolidating. Gathering the seven files, discovering that two people changed the column structure, reconciling the numbers that do not match, formatting the report. In most organizations that is two weeks of real work spread across a month. Seventy hours.
Total: one hundred and thirty-eight hours a year.
Take the loaded hourly rate of a manager in your organization and multiply. The number you get is the real price of your free spreadsheet.
The hours nobody ever counts
That 138 hour total is optimistic, because it assumes everything goes well.
It does not count hunting for the right version. Plan_tracking_2026.xlsx, Plan_tracking_2026_v2.xlsx, Plan_tracking_2026_FINAL_revised.xlsx. Someone spends half a day a year working out which one governs, and sometimes redoing work already done in a version nobody had opened.
It does not count explaining the discrepancies. Two departments answer the same question with two different numbers because they were not measuring the same thing. Finding out why, then deciding which one survives, takes meetings.
It does not count the departure. When the person who kept the file moves on, their successor spends a quarter working out the logic of the tabs. That quarter, tracking does not advance, it gets decoded.
Add those three and you are closer to a hundred and sixty or a hundred and eighty hours. A full month of one person's work, every year, to know where you stand.
The cost that is not counted in hours
The real cost is not there, though. It is in what does not get decided.
When information arrives once a year, decisions follow the same rhythm. A project in trouble in month three gets corrected in month three, if someone sees it. If it surfaces in month eleven inside a consolidated report, it does not get corrected: it gets noted.
The difference between the two is not a question of discipline. It is the delay between the moment information exists somewhere in the organization and the moment it reaches someone who can act on it.
In a spreadsheet, that delay is structurally several months. Not through negligence. Because collection costs too much to run more often.
That is the trap, and it is a nasty one: the more tracking costs, the less often you do it, and the less often you do it, the later the information arrives.
Why this invoice grows every year
A tracking spreadsheet does not stay stable. It grows.
You add a column for a new funder. A tab for a provincial target. A section because one department wanted its own view. Each addition is reasonable on its own, and after three years the file cannot be maintained by anyone except the person who built it.
Meanwhile the number of measured obligations keeps rising. Procurement, emissions, accessibility, data protection, funding conditions. The general direction is toward more data to produce, not less.
In other words, next year's invoice in hours will be higher than this year's, and the one after that higher still.
Three ways to bring the total down
There are not many. Each one removes a specific line from the arithmetic.
- Remove the collection. If the people accountable update their own actions as they progress, the twelve hours of chasing and most of the fifty-six hours of answering disappear. This is not the same work redistributed: it is two minutes per person instead of half a day per quarter.
- Remove the consolidation. If reports are generated from the same data the teams are updating, the seventy hours of reconciliation have no purpose left. There are no versions to reconcile because there is only one version.
- Accept a lower total, not a zero one. No platform takes tracking to zero hours. There will always be judgment to apply, reviews to write and decisions to make. The goal is to pay for that, not for collection.
That is exactly what Planivore does: the people accountable update their actions and tasks, progress rolls up to the plan elements they are attached to, and the report to council comes out of the same data instead of a reconstruction.
I will be straight about one thing: I sell a tracking platform, so this conclusion suits me. Run the arithmetic with your own numbers anyway. If your organization has two departments and fifteen actions, your total will be modest and your spreadsheet is doing the job perfectly well. Keep it.
But if you land above a hundred hours a year, you are no longer asking whether you can afford a tracking tool. You are already paying for one. It is simply billed in manager hours rather than in licence fees.
Running the arithmetic with your own numbers
Our guides on strategic plan execution describe the tracking cadence that replaces collection rounds.
Free Guides to Execute Your Strategic Plan
To compare your total in hours against what a tracking platform would cost, book a 30 minute demo.
