Where should information about the people I work with live: a spreadsheet or something else?

Maybe you are looking at the file and wondering. The sheet you started with ten names has grown to a hundred rows. Columns have appeared – “last spoke”, “promised”, “type of work”, “next step” – but nobody fills them in the same way. The useful part lives in someone’s head. Should you move to a dedicated system, a CRM? The honest answer is that both will fail you on upkeep. They fail for the same reason: the question is not which tool can store the information, but who writes it, and why they would bother.

How to keep track of clients in Excel

Let the sheet have its credit. It is cheap, it is flexible, it is yours. You can shape it in an afternoon. No one asks you for a subscription or a training session. For a short list of people, a well-kept spreadsheet is faster than anything else.

What columns earn their place? The name of the person, the company they work for (if it matters), how you know them or how they came to you, and the last thing you agreed to do for each other. That is enough. Add a column for “next date I should check in” if you use it. Add a column for “notes” – plain sentences, not codes.

The habit that keeps the sheet true is a short one. Every Friday afternoon, or every Monday morning, you open the sheet and you read the rows. You ask yourself: did anything change this week? Did someone call, did someone send a message, did you promise to send something? You write the change in the notes column, and you move the date. That habit is the only reason a spreadsheet works for more than a few months. Without it, the sheet becomes a fossil – accurate in the past, useless now.

Where a spreadsheet stops working

The limit is not the number of rows. It is the number of people who touch it, and the type of information you need to keep.

History: a sheet shows the current state, but not how you got there. If you change a note, the old note disappears. You cannot see what someone promised three months ago unless you remember to keep a log, and few people do.

Reasons: you can put a reason in the notes – “stopped working with them”, “they referred two people” – but you have to type it every time, and you have to agree on the language. One person writes “done”, another writes “finished”, a third writes “not active”. That works until you need to count.

Dates: a sheet can hold a date, but it will not remind you. You have to remember to look. If you have fifty people, you will miss a few.

Promises: the most useful information is what you said you would do, and what they said they would do. In a sheet that lives on your desktop, those promises are just text. They do not turn into tasks. They do not come back to you.

Many hands: when three people share a sheet, the columns drift. Someone adds a column for “source”, someone adds “email”, someone adds “last contact”. Now you have a row with fifteen columns, half of them empty. Nobody updates the shared file because it feels like a public document that you must not break. So people keep their own notes and the sheet becomes the official thing that nobody trusts.

The sheet stops working honestly when the effort to keep it correct outweighs the effort of just remembering. At that point the information lives in someone’s head, and the business depends on that person not leaving.

Moving from a sheet

If you decide to move, you do not need to map every detail. You need an import you review: contacts and companies only.

Export your sheet as a CSV or Excel file. Keep the columns that matter: person name, organisation name (if you use it), a note or two. Leave the rest behind. On Felesh the import shows you the column mapping and the rows before anything is saved. It brings in contacts and companies only.

The process is on the import page.

How this goes on Felesh

Once the sheet is imported, the work changes. Here is how it goes.

1. Bring the list in. Import contacts and companies from your file.

2. Do the work on Felesh. When you have a conversation – in person, on the phone, by message – you type one sentence after it ends. “She said she would send the files by Friday and wants a call next week.” Felesh turns that sentence into a note. It also drafts the promises and dates it finds, each with its reason beside it, for your yes, and adds any task directly.

3. Ask in words what you know about a person. Instead of searching columns, you ask: “What do I know about Maria?” Felesh shows you the notes, the promises, the dates. You can ask about a specific promise: “What did I promise to James?” It tells you. You do not need to remember the column name.

Felesh knows only what you put on it: the imported contacts and companies, the notes you write, the knowledge you upload or type. It does not read your email or your drives. It does not connect to anything else.

Whichever you choose

The sheet or the tool – whatever you pick, the fix is who writes it. If the people who have the information must type it into a separate place, the information will go stale. The trick is to make the writing happen as close to the moment as possible, and to make the result visible in plain words. The sheet asks you to open it and remember a column. The alternative asks you to say one sentence after a conversation and then approve what it makes from that sentence.

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If the sheet no longer feels true, the records page shows how each person you work with is kept on one record.