Personal CRM vs spreadsheet

What a spreadsheet gets right

Nearly everyone starts with a spreadsheet, and it is the right place to start. It costs nothing, you own the file, and you can add a column the second you realise you need one without asking anyone or waiting on a roadmap. Because you built it, you know exactly what is in it and what it means.

A sheet also does the first job of a personal CRM properly. It holds one list of people in one place, which is more than most people had before. If you have ever tried to reconstruct who you know from your phone, two inboxes and a stack of LinkedIn connections, a single tab of names is a real improvement.

So the honest position is not that spreadsheets are bad. It is that a spreadsheet does one of the four jobs well and the other three not at all.

The column that goes wrong first

Contact sheets grow the same handful of columns almost everywhere. Name, company, how we met, last contact, next step. The first three are stable, because they are facts you learned once and they rarely change.

Last contact is the one that rots. A date you typed in March is a claim about March, and it sits there looking equally confident in September. The sheet has no idea that you replied to that person from your phone last Tuesday, that they emailed you twice in July, or that you sat in the same meeting a fortnight ago. None of that reaches the file unless you stop and type it.

Nobody types it. Not because people are lazy, but because the moment you would record an interaction is the moment you are busy having it. Within a couple of months the column is fiction, and it is the column you actually make decisions with. Everything downstream of it, who is overdue, who to reach out to this week, who you have been quietly neglecting, is downstream of a number you can no longer trust.

Where the sheet stops on the other three jobs

Remembering the history. A personal CRM that syncs shows you when you last spoke, how often you speak, and whether the conversation goes both ways, without you entering any of it. A sheet holds whatever you remembered to write down, which is a small and biased sample of your actual relationships. The people you record are the ones you were already thinking about.

Telling you who is going quiet. This is the job that turns a list into something useful, and it is impossible on a sheet, because it depends entirely on the history being true. You can write a formula that flags any row where last contact is older than ninety days. It will flag the people whose dates you forgot to update, not the people you have actually lost touch with.

Answering questions about your network. Who do I know in fintech in London. Who has hired a head of sales. A sheet can only answer from what you typed into it, so the answer is bounded by what you thought to record at the time. The information you want is usually sitting in your inbox, in a signature or a thread, where the sheet cannot reach it.

When a spreadsheet is still the right answer

There are real cases where switching is the wrong move.

If the list is small enough that you can still hold it in your head, the sheet is a backup for your memory rather than a replacement, and that works. If the list is temporary, forty conference follow ups or a hiring shortlist you will close out in six weeks, a sheet is faster to build than any tool is to set up. And if relationships are not really the work, a phone contact list and an inbox search will carry you further than people expect.

Privacy is the other honest reason to stay. Any tool that keeps your history current is reading your mail, at minimum the metadata of who you wrote to and when. If that is a line you do not want to cross, the sheet is a legitimate answer. Monica is worth knowing about here too, since it is open source and self hostable, so nothing leaves a machine you control. You will still be typing the history in yourself, which means the last contact column has the same problem it always did.

What switching actually buys you

Three things, and they are all consequences of the same change. The tool observes your email and calendar instead of waiting for you to describe them.

Dates you did not type. Last contact becomes something the tool watched happen rather than something you remembered to record, so it stays right whether you open the app or not.

A short list instead of a long one. Once the history is accurate, the tool can hand you the handful of people you have genuine history with who have gone quiet. That is a different object from a list of everyone you know, and it is the one you can act on in ten minutes.

Search across what you never wrote down. Companies, titles and context that only ever existed in a thread become findable, because the tool read the thread.

The tools that do this differ mostly in how they nudge you afterwards. Dex is the most widely used, syncing email and LinkedIn into a timeline per person with reminders that stay gentle. Relatable reaches the widest set of channels, pulling in iMessage and WhatsApp alongside email, and groups people into Spheres that each carry their own cadence. Clay grows each record with enrichment and public news about the person. Covve is built phone first, and its news feed about your contacts is why people keep it open. If a couple of people need to share the list, Folk suits a founder or small agency, and Affinity is the firm wide option that venture and private equity teams standardise on, with relationship scoring across everyone's inbox.

NetworkOS belongs in this section only if your spreadsheet was really a list of people you might introduce to each other. It reads Gmail, Calendar and LinkedIn so the history is observed rather than typed, finds who in your network fits a need you describe in plain English, drafts the double opt in in your voice, sends it from your own Gmail and watches for the reply. Where it is weaker than the alternatives above is coverage. It is Google only today, so an Outlook mailbox is not supported, and there is no shared directory or public request link.

How to move without losing what you built

The migration is a CSV export and an import, and the only real decision is which columns to carry.

Keep the ones no sync can reconstruct. How you met someone, what they are working on, the note about their kid starting school, the tag that says which of your companies they would be useful to. That context exists nowhere except your file, and losing it is the one genuinely irreversible part of switching.

Drop last contact and next step. The new tool rebuilds both from your real email and calendar history, and your typed versions will only sit alongside the accurate ones creating doubt about which to believe.

Then run both for a month. Keep the original file untouched, let the tool fill in its own history, and compare. If the synced dates match your memory better than your own column did, you have your answer, and you can archive the sheet knowing what it was for.

The short version

A spreadsheet does one of the four jobs of a personal CRM well and cannot do the other three, because it cannot see your inbox. The failure is specific and predictable. The last contact column stops being true, and everything you wanted the list for depends on that column. Start on a sheet, keep it while the list fits in your head, and move when you catch yourself guessing at dates. Carry the context you typed, leave the dates behind, and let the new tool rebuild them from what actually happened.