Did you know the average worker uses about 9 different business applications and the average small business uses about 73 applications? Apps to manage everything from accounting to marketing may be handy, but they come with steep learning curves and costs.
Fortunately, there is a simpler solution: the humble Google Sheets spreadsheet. With a little tweaking, your Google Sheets can become an effective tool that won’t break the bank.
In this article, we’ll show you 7+ ways to use Google Sheets for your business based on the experiences we’ve been hearing from our sheet.best customers.
Ways to Use Google Sheets to Streamline Your Business:
- Use Google Sheets to understand your data
- Manage your tasks & projects
- Get your accounting done without headaches
- Create internal and external schedules
- Manage your leads and customers
- Organize customer feedback
- Manage your marketing campaigns
- Automate chatbot and support responses
- Securely store your data
1. Use Google Sheets to Get Business Insights
To make better business decisions, you need deeper business insights that show you how well you’re performing, how efficient your business is, and where your processes might need work. In turn, to get these insights, you need data:
- Is your sales cycle too long? Where do leads drop off in the process?
- Is the way you manage inventory costing you productivity?
Fortunately, Google Sheets gives you both. For one, it’s a perfect place to store your data. And when it comes to gathering insights from your data, it gives you a few options.
For example, you can use pivot tables to extract relevant data points from your data and see the relationship between them. You can also use Google Sheets to generate graphs, reports, and charts that give you insights into your business.
Source: PowerBI
Finally, you can also use your Google Sheets as data sources for business intelligence platforms like PowerBI. Here, you’ll use sheet.best to convert your sheets into APIs you can plug into business analytics tools.
Need some inspiration? We love these free Google Sheets templates!
2. Manage Your Projects
Most project management tools are quite costly and a pain to integrate with Google Sheets if you tend to run your business from a spreadsheet.
Fortunately, when it comes to managing small and medium projects, Google Sheets can be the perfect solution:
- Track budgets
- Assign people to tasks
- Make sure tasks are completed on time
- Adjust due dates as tasks and completion statuses change
And because it’s so good at improving collaboration, everyone on your team will always know what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, and who should do it.
You can even take it a step further by using Google Sheets as the basis for your own no-code project management tool.
It doesn’t stop there, though. As you know, Google Sheets does collaboration really well. And while you can use these features to improve your team’s communication, you can also use them to engage and communicate with your customers.
As such, you’ll give them access to your project sheet and enable them to provide feedback throughout the process.
Need some templates to manage your finances and power them up with sheet.best? We love these Google Sheets templates for:
3. Streamline Your Accounting
Managing your business’s finances is a significant component of running a successful business. With Google Sheets, you can easily:
- Create budgets
- Manage your expenses
- Create financial forecasts
- Keep your accounting up to date
In addition, the tool provides several templates, from annual budgets to monthly expense reports. You can even create your own or customize existing templates based on your needs.
Source: SheetGo
If you use a third-party tool like QuickBooks, simply turn your Google Sheets into an API with sheet.best, and you’ll be able to manage everything from your central accounting headquarters.
To make your accounting simpler, here are some Google Sheets templates for financial statements, an expense report, and a business budget.
4. Streamline Your Scheduling
Most things in your business run on some sort of schedule:
- Marketing campaigns have to run at specific times
- Products need to be delivered by certain dates
- Meetings need to be held when everyone’s available
(And that’s without touching on the customers’ fickle availability.)
Luckily, with Google Sheets, you can create calendars and schedules that meet your exact needs. When you do, you’ll ensure that everyone on your team always knows what should happen by when.
Want to schedule and plan your time better? Here’s a template for a calendar and time tracking.
With sheet.best, you can connect your spreadsheet to your inventory management or HR tools. It’ll stay updated, no matter the weather.
5. Use Google Sheets for Lead Management
To increase your conversion rate, you not only need to gather leads but also nurture them through your sales pipeline. Google Sheets is the simplest and most affordable option when you don’t have any other specialized tools or platforms.
With Google Sheets, you can create spreadsheets and customize them to your liking with the fields you require to manage your leads properly.
These fields can include:
- Lead’s name
- Contact details
- Lead source
- Business specifics
- Company size
- Meeting logs
And more!
Create a spreadsheet and customize it with sheet.best and a lightweight CRM.
And when you combine your lead management with some of the data analysis tools mentioned earlier, you can get rich insights into where your leads are coming from and how well they convert.
6. Organize Customer Feedback
Your offering needs to align with what your customers want and expect. As such, you need to understand your customers, their challenges, and their needs. One of the best ways to do this is by using regular customer surveys to get feedback.
And here, Google Sheets can be a powerful data-gathering tool because it integrates fully with Google Forms.
Source: Google
You can create customer surveys and questionnaires with the relevant questions and analyze the responses in Google Sheets. You’ll learn where you need to improve, and you can even start deeper conversations with customers if you turn your Google Sheets into a REST API.
Here is a Gantt Chart template you can use to plan your projects better. Or you can use this one to schedule your day.
7. Organize Your Marketing Campaigns with Google Sheets
You need effective marketing to generate awareness and increase your sales. Normally, you’d have to use complex and expensive tools. But if you’re not afraid to roll up your sleeves, you can use the free templates to manage every aspect of your campaigns.
For example, you can use Google Sheets to:
- Plan what content you’ll deliver to your audience
- Keep track of your key marketing performance metrics
- Aggregate insights (based on your metrics, tweak your campaigns to improve their performance over time)
Here, some of the metrics you’ll track include:
- CPL (Cost-per-Lead)
- CTR (Click-through rate)
- Bounce Rate
- Conversion rate
- CLV (Customer lifetime value), and more.
No matter what metrics you track, you’ll get valuable insights into how effective your marketing is and what you can do to improve.
You can also manage and run your email marketing campaigns. Segment your customers in separate sheets and then use an add-on that allows you to send marketing emails in bulk. With these add-ons, you can even track how many customers open your emails, click on the links in them, and your bounce rate.
When you need to manage projects, whether it’s marketing or otherwise, you can try this project timeline template. You can also give this project tracking template a try.
Then, use the sheet.best API to connect your spreadsheet to your marketing tools and coordinate campaigns seamlessly.
8. Manage Customer Relationships
Let’s face it; your customers are arguably your business’s most valuable asset. So, you should manage your relationships effectively. When you do, you’ll have no problems converting once-off purchases into repeat business.
To manage these relationships, you’ll need a CRM system. Unfortunately, there are so many CRMs available that it’s difficult to choose. And that’s not even mentioning that most of these systems are quite pricey.
Luckily, Google Sheets can also come to the rescue here. So, you can use a simple spreadsheet to keep track of your customers and interactions with them or, as we showed you in an earlier post, build your own CRM with Google Sheets and sheet.best.
Case Study: CHWIC Automates Customer Support with sheet.best
The Community Health Impact Coalition (CHWIC) uses sheet.best and Google Sheets to:
- Automate customer support ticketing
- Easily assign the right agent to the issue
- Communicate between devs and customer support
- Keep track of the issue resolution
- Keep affected customers updated on the issue
Ultimately, CHWIC’s customer support team saved a lot of time and increased customer satisfaction, thanks to Google Sheets & sheet.best
9. Manage and Automate Your Chatbot Responses
Chatbots are all the rage these days, and it’s easy to see why. They provide customers with information when they need it and solve issues, so you don’t have to get involved with every ticket.
Fortunately, getting a chatbot is no longer expensive – especially if you use Google Sheets to build and automate a chatbot conversation database. All you need is sheet.best.
And this is exactly what B4BCompany did.
How B4B Company Built a Powerful Chatbot Database with sheet.best
B4BCompany used the sheet.best API to turn Google Sheets into their chatbot HQ.
When someone lands on their website, there’s an automated workflow:
- The chatbot automatically gathers information from the visitor
- Queries the API
- Provides the information the prospect is looking for
This ultimately reduced the time they had to spend managing chatbots.
10. Store Data Securely
We’ve now looked at some exciting ways in which you can use Google Sheets for your business. But, sometimes, you only need a place to store your data.
And here, Google Sheets also excels.
For one, you get to store your data in a format that everyone knows and loves. And with Google spending a significant portion of its budget on security, you can rest easy knowing that Google Sheets has got you covered.
11. Tracking Time
Finally, you can also Google Sheets to track time, whether it’s tracking your employees’ time or the time spent on a project.
There are several advantages to doing this. For one, when using Google Sheets, you won’t need to invest in costly time-tracking software.
Also, when you keep a proper record of how much time your employees spend on any specific task, you can analyze their efficiency. This then allows you to spot any issues earlier and helps you implement measures to make your team more productive.
It Doesn’t Stop There
These are just the tip of the iceberg, with many other ways to use Google Sheets to streamline your business:
- Payroll management
- Inventory management
- Job and task lists
- Attendance registers
- Cashflow management
- Billing
- Competitor tracking
- SEO and keyword tracking, and more!
Get More Value Out of Your Google Sheets
Now that you’ve seen how versatile Google Sheets can be, it’s time to make your life easier! No matter if you need to organize your contacts or automate your chatbots, Google Sheets can help.
And when you add sheet.best into the mix, your good old spreadsheet will turn into a powerful database. Try sheet.best for free today!