vs. spreadsheets & mail
It really does work.
Until somebody goes on leave.
Our real competitor is not a product. It is a shared sheet, a mail thread and a group chat, and it wins far more of these decisions than vendors like to admit. It is free, everyone knows how to use it, and there is no rollout. It also breaks at specific points, and it is worth knowing which before you reach them.
What this category is genuinely good at
What a spreadsheet is genuinely good at
This assessment is honest. A spreadsheet is usually the correct first step.
Zero friction
No procurement, no security review, no rollout. You open it and start working.
Completely flexible
A new column takes a second. No product adapts faster.
Everybody already knows it
No user needs training and no role needs a permission.
Entirely sufficient at small scale
Fifty hosts and two owners are managed perfectly well in a sheet. Genuinely.
Where it breaks
Not because of the spreadsheet. Because it has no memory.
Nothing reminds anyone
A sheet sends no SMS and lands in no calendar. The window arrives, and if nobody remembers, it passes.
No approval record
"I approved it by mail" against "I never got it". No text kept, no timestamp, and nothing to show an auditor.
Collisions surface at night
Two tabs, two teams, one night. The sheet does not know those two systems depend on each other.
The knowledge leaves with the person
Who owns it, why this window always slips, what happened last time — all in the coordinator's head. They change roles and it is deleted.
An audit exposes the gap
The auditor picks three changes at random. The sheet has a row. There is no approval, no checklist and no audit trail.
What changes
The same process, with a memory.
The window reminds you itself
A calendar invite for everyone involved, and an SMS hours before. Nobody has to remember.
The approval is kept
Who approved, when, and against which text — as a row, not as mail in somebody's folder.
Collisions are flagged in advance
While the time is being chosen, not at 3am.
The knowledge stays
Owners, contacts and history are held against the system rather than the person.
Same job, two approaches
The rows where the spreadsheet wins are real, not written to look even-handed.
| The job | Spreadsheet & mail | Regulaxy |
|---|---|---|
| Start today | Immediate, free, nobody's approval required. | An installation, a security review, procurement. |
| Change the structure | A new column in a second. | Fields and templates set in configuration. Flexible, but not that flexible. |
| Remember to remind | A person. Who sometimes remembers. | A calendar invite and an automatic SMS. |
| Owner approval | A mail, if it was kept. | A timestamped record with the text that was sent. |
| Two systems, one night | Discovered live. | Warned about at booking time, from a dependency map. |
| Current inventory | Updated by hand. Stale from day one. | Read from your own sources on every load. |
| Audit sample | A row in a sheet, and hope. | Approval, checklist and audit log per change. |
| Somebody leaves | The knowledge goes with them. | Owners, contacts and history stay on the record. |
When you would not need Regulaxy
We do not think every organisation should stop using a spreadsheet. In these cases staying is the right call:
- When you have fewer than about fifty hosts and one or two owners. At that scale the sheet is simply better.
- When you patch four times a year and no system depends on another. There is not enough coordination here to justify a product.
- When there is no internal audit and no regulator asking. A third of our value is evidence, and with nobody to show it to there is no value.
- When the current process genuinely works and nobody is chasing anybody. If that is true, this is spend buying a small improvement.
- When nobody will own the product. Even a good tool needs one person responsible for it; without that it becomes an expensive spreadsheet.
The test we would suggest: how many windows slipped last quarter, and how many of those slipped for coordination reasons rather than technical ones. If the second number is small, the spreadsheet wins, and we will not argue otherwise.
Want to check before you talk to us?
The coordination-cost calculator runs that arithmetic on your own numbers. It runs in the browser, sends nothing anywhere, and every assumption in it is editable.
- If the number comes out small, that is a good answer, and it does not need a meeting.