Your Most Important Spreadsheet Should Not Be Your Biggest Risk
Most organizations have at least one spreadsheet that payroll, pricing or month-end reporting cannot run without. It usually sits outside normal IT care: no clear owner, no tested backup, edited by whoever has access, and understood by one person. Ceifa brings those files into your managed IT service. We back them up, control who can change them, document how they work, fix them when they break, and tell you early when one is getting too fragile to trust.
What We Look After in Your Spreadsheets
Each line below is part of the managed service, handled the same way we handle your laptops, accounts and servers: tracked, supported and reviewed.
Break/Fix When a Workbook Stops Working
Links that point to a folder that moved, a #REF! error that spreads after someone deletes a column, a file that will not open after an Office update. When a spreadsheet your team depends on breaks, you raise it with our helpdesk like any other IT issue. Critical issues get a response within 30 minutes during business hours, and we fix the cause, not just the symptom.
Backups and Version History You Can Restore
A workbook saved only to a desktop or a USB stick is one failed drive away from gone. We move critical files to a managed, backed-up location with version history turned on, so an overwritten tab or a corrupted file can be rolled back to yesterday's copy instead of rebuilt from memory.
Access Control: Who Can Open It and Who Can Change It
Payroll, pricing and forecasting workbooks often sit in folders half the company can edit. We set permissions so the right people can change the file, others can only view it, and former staff lose access the day they leave, as part of the same onboarding and offboarding we run for every account.
Documentation That Outlasts Any One Employee
For each critical workbook we write a short runbook: what it does, where its data comes from, who owns it, and what to do when it fails. It sits with the rest of your IT documentation, so a sick day or a resignation does not take the know-how with it.
Small Changes Without Starting a Project
A new month tab, an updated rate, an extra column for a new product line. Small changes to an existing workbook come through the same helpdesk you already use, and we test them on a copy before the live file is touched.
Early Warning Before a Fragile Workbook Fails
Some files show the signs long before they break: links to personal drives, hard-coded figures, a single editor, a file that takes minutes to calculate. We raise those risks in our regular reviews with you. When a workbook needs a real rebuild or a move to Power BI, that work is delivered with Regroove, our sister consultancy, and we keep supporting the result.
Your Contact for This Service
Clod Feijao, Partner and Director of Client Success
Clod looks after client relationships at Ceifa, and that includes how we support the workbooks, macros and databases your teams rely on. If a spreadsheet keeps failing, or support alone is no longer enough, he makes sure the issue is raised with you and gets a clear answer.
When a file needs a proper rebuild, Clod brings in Regroove, our sister consultancy, and stays involved so the finished work comes back under the same managed support, documented and backed up like the rest of your environment.
Read Clod's profileBringing a Workbook Under Management
Every critical spreadsheet goes through the same onboarding before we support it. Each step below is one tab in that checklist.
Find the Files That Matter
We ask each team one question: which file would hurt most if it disappeared tomorrow? The answers become a short list of workbooks that deserve the same attention as any other business system.
Risk Check
For each file we look at where it is stored, who can edit it, whether it is backed up, what other files it links to, and whether it carries macros or connections that could fail after an update.
Secure and Back Up
We move the file to a managed location, set permissions to match who really needs them, and confirm that version history and backups cover it.
Write the Runbook
We document what the workbook does, who owns it, where its data comes from, and the first steps to take when something goes wrong.
Support It Day to Day
From then on, breakages and small change requests go through the helpdesk. Each fix is noted in the runbook, so the next person can see what changed and why.
Review and Plan Ahead
We revisit critical workbooks in our regular reviews and flag the ones that are getting harder to keep alive. Where a rebuild is the right call, we scope it with Regroove, our sister consultancy.
What a Spreadsheet Ticket Looks Like
A typical example, put together from the kinds of requests we handle rather than one client's story.
The month-end workbook that would not refresh
On the first business day of the month, a finance lead opens the reporting workbook and every linked figure shows an error. Nothing in the file has changed, but the source files were moved to a new SharePoint library the week before and the links still point to the old location. The request comes in to our helpdesk. We confirm the last good version is safe in version history, point the links at the new library, check that the totals match the source files, and add the new paths to the workbook's runbook. We also note that the file depends on hard-coded links to other files, flag it as a candidate for a sturdier setup, and bring it up at the next review.
Common Questions
Which Spreadsheet Would Hurt Most to Lose?
Tell us which files your teams rely on. We will show you how Ceifa would back them up, secure them and support them as part of your managed IT, and be straight with you about which ones need more than support. As a Microsoft Solutions Partner (Modern Work), we know the Microsoft 365 environment these files live in.
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