Do You Have a Six-Figure Spreadsheet Problem?

Chasity Gibson
Oct 6
3 min read

Solve Six-Figure Spreadsheet Problem with TrueFunnel

Everyone who touches marketing has lived it: the end-of-month scramble to stitch together reports from GA4, Salesforce, HubSpot, LinkedIn Ads, and a dozen or so spreadsheets. It takes hours, it drags half the team into the weeds, and by the time the numbers get to the exec team, no one’s fully sure they’re right.

All that manual reporting isn’t just frustrating. It’s expensive. For many teams, it quietly burns six figures a year (six figures that could be fueling campaigns, creative, events, headcount, you name it).

The Hidden Spreadsheet Tax

Manual reporting only feels “free” because it’s buried inside salaries. Add it up and it’s anything but.

Let’s walk through a typical example.

Labor Cost Formula: # of people × average hourly rate × hours per month × 12 months

Example:

8 team members across marketing, sales ops, and finance
10 hours each per month spent on reporting
$75/hour average rate

Run that through the math and you get $72,000 a year.

That’s $72,000 you’re spending just to assemble reports you don’t fully trust. And on top of that, every one of those hours is time those employees aren’t spending on campaigns, creative, or growth.

The Lag Cost

Wait, there’s more.

The spreadsheet tax isn’t just the hours spent; it’s also the opportunities you miss while you’re waiting for the numbers to come together. Every extra day your reports lag is a day you’re late to reallocate spend, double down on a winner, or pull the plug on a campaign that’s not moving the needle.

Lag Cost Formula: (Annual Marketing Budget × % Impact ÷ 250 business days) × Time-to-Insight × 12 cycles

Let’s plug in some numbers as an example:

$1M annual marketing budget
2% impact potential (conservative) = $20,000/year of influenceable dollars
$80/day of value on the table
7 days average lag to finalize reports

Do the math and you’re looking at $6,720 a year lost to delayed decisions.

The Confidence Penalty

Yeah. We’re not done yet. There’s another hidden fee you have to contend with.

Even after pouring resources into reporting, most leaders don’t fully trust the numbers. Different teams pull data different ways. Numbers don’t line up across tools. Attribution gets fuzzy.

When confidence breaks down, something worse happens: people stop using the data. Instead of acting on clear insights, they fall back on gut instinct, personal bias, or whatever helps them hit their own quarterly KPIs. Decisions drift from data-informed to politically convenient.

That lack of trust is its own tax.

Confidence Penalty Formula: (100% – Confidence %) × Annual Reporting Cost

Example:

$72,000/year in reporting cost
50% confidence in accuracy

That means $36,000/year wasted on reporting no one feels confident enough to use.

Stack It Up: The Six-Figure Problem

When you put it all together — labor costs, lag costs, and the confidence penalty — the picture gets ugly fast.

In our composite example, it totals up to:

$72,000 in labor
$6,720 in lag
$36,000 in wasted reporting

That’s already into six figures. And for bigger teams, bigger budgets, higher salaries, longer delays, and lower confidence? The totals climb fast.

One team’s $120,000 spreadsheet problem could be another team’s $400,000 problem.

Play Along: What’s It Costing You?

Want to see how this plays out for your team? Grab a notepad and plug in:

Number of people touching reporting each month
Average hourly rate
Hours spent per month
Days it takes to finalize reports
Your own confidence %

Then run them through the formulas:

Labor Cost Formula: # of people × average hourly rate × hours per month × 12 months

Lag Cost Formula: (Annual Marketing Budget × % Impact ÷ 250 business days) × Time-to-Insight × 12 cycles

Confidence Penalty Formula: (100% – Confidence %) × Annual Reporting Cost

Do the quick math, and you’ll see how much time and money reporting is really eating.

The Way Out

The good news: this isn’t a tax you have to keep paying.

With TrueFunnel, all the stitching and wrangling goes away. Marketing, sales, and post-sale data flow into a single dashboard that shows what’s really happening. Without chasing down numbers, waiting a week for clean reports, or debating whose spreadsheet is “right”.

Instead of sinking six figures into reporting overhead, you get a clear, trusted view of your funnel. You see which campaigns are driving pipeline and revenue. You spot where retention is slipping before it becomes churn. And you can make faster calls with data the whole team believes in.

And hey, with the money you’re not burning on spreadsheet chaos, you might even have budget left for something fun, like that team offsite everyone keeps hinting at.