Almost every business we talk to runs on Excel. Usually that's fine. Excel is fast, everyone knows it, and you already pay for it. So when someone asks us whether they should "move to Power BI", our first answer is usually another question: what is Excel actually doing for you right now?
If the answer is "a few calculations and a budget", keep it. If the answer is "it's how we find out how the business is doing every month", that's a different conversation. This article is about telling those two situations apart.
The short version
- Excel is still the better tool for budgets, quick analysis and anything one person works on alone.
- Power BI is better for reports that repeat every week or month, pull from several systems, and get shared.
- It's not either/or. Most companies end up using both, and Power BI can read your existing Excel files.
Where Excel Is Still the Right Answer
We build Power BI reports for a living, so it might sound odd to start here. But pushing a business into a tool it doesn't need is the quickest way to end up with dashboards nobody opens.
Stick with Excel when:
- You're planning, not reporting. Budgets, forecasts and "what if we hire two more people" scenarios need you to type numbers in and change them freely. Excel is built for that. Power BI isn't.
- It's a one-off question. If the board wants to know something once, export the data, build a pivot table and be done in an hour.
- One person owns it. A spreadsheet that one accountant maintains and nobody else touches rarely causes trouble.
- Your data is small and lives in one place. A few thousand rows exported from one system don't need a BI platform.
It's also worth knowing that modern Excel is more capable than most people use it for. Power Query (under the Data tab) can pull and clean data from files and databases automatically, and Power Pivot can handle millions of rows. If you haven't tried those yet, they might buy you another year.
Where Excel Starts to Hurt
The trouble usually isn't Excel itself. It's what grows around it. A typical monthly report at a growing company looks something like this:
Someone exports sales from the ERP, someone else exports invoices from the accounting system, and a third file comes from the e-shop. They get pasted into a master workbook called something like Monthly_Report_FINAL_v3_updated.xlsx. A few VLOOKUPs link them together. The person who built it knows which tabs not to touch. It takes two or three days at the start of every month, and when that person is on holiday, the report is late.
None of that is a disaster on day one. It gets expensive slowly. Here are the signs we look for:
1. The same report is rebuilt by hand every month
If someone spends a day or more copying, pasting and checking the same numbers each month, that's twelve working days a year spent on work a refresh button could do. And that's before counting the mistakes.
2. Two people bring two different numbers to the same meeting
Sales says revenue was one figure, finance says another. Usually both are "right". They just used different exports, different dates or a different definition of revenue. Half the meeting goes on working out whose file is correct.
3. Files are emailed around and nobody knows which version is current
Once a workbook leaves your laptop it starts to multiply. People make their own copies, add their own tabs, and a month later there are five versions of the truth.
4. The file is slow, huge, or close to breaking
An Excel sheet tops out at 1,048,576 rows, but in practice workbooks get painful long before that. If opening the file means time for a coffee, the tool is telling you something.
5. Everything depends on one person
This is the one owners underestimate most. If the person who built the workbook leaves, the knowledge of how the numbers are calculated often leaves with them.
If two or more of these sound familiar, you've probably outgrown Excel as a reporting system. You haven't outgrown Excel.
Power BI vs Excel: Side by Side
A simplified comparison for a small or medium business:
| Excel | Power BI | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Planning, quick analysis, one-off questions | Recurring, shared reports and dashboards |
| Data refresh | Manual, or semi-automatic with Power Query | Scheduled automatically (up to 8 times a day with Pro) |
| Combining sources | Possible, often fragile | Designed for it: ERP, accounting, CRM, e-shop, Excel files |
| Sharing | Email or SharePoint files, easy to copy and change | One published report, permissions per person |
| Data volume | Comfortable up to a few hundred thousand rows | Millions of rows without much trouble |
| Mobile | Works, but awkward | Dedicated phone app with mobile layouts |
| Learning curve | Most staff already know it | Easy to use, harder to build well |
| Cost | Included in Microsoft 365 | Desktop free, Pro licence €12/user/month (excl. VAT) to share |
What Does Power BI Actually Cost?
Less than most people expect, at least for the software. Power BI Desktop, where you build reports, is a free download. To share reports securely inside your company, each person who builds or views them needs a Power BI Pro licence. At the time of writing that's €12 per user per month, excluding VAT. Some Microsoft 365 plans, such as E5, already include it.
So a team of ten is looking at €120 a month before VAT, about the price of a couple of business lunches. The real cost isn't the licence. It's the time to set things up properly: connecting the data sources, cleaning them, and agreeing on what "revenue" or "active customer" means. That part is where projects succeed or stall, and it's the part people tend to skip.
How to Switch Without Disrupting Everything
You don't need a big migration project. The approach that works best for small businesses is boring and gradual:
- Pick the one report that hurts most. Usually the monthly sales or management report. Ignore everything else for now.
- Write down the numbers it must show. Five to ten figures, each with a clear definition everyone agrees on.
- Connect to the source, not the export. Wherever possible, Power BI should read directly from the ERP, accounting system or a shared folder, not from a file someone pasted together.
- Run both side by side for a month or two. Keep the old Excel report until the numbers match and people trust the new one.
- Then move to the next report. By the third one, the data model is already there and new reports are much faster to build.
If your data lives in many different systems, at some point it makes sense to bring it into one place first. We wrote about that in why data warehousing matters for SMEs. For most small businesses, though, Power BI on its own is the right first step.
Common Questions
Is Power BI free for small businesses?
Building reports is free with Power BI Desktop. Sharing them securely with colleagues needs a Pro licence for each person involved, unless your Microsoft 365 plan already includes it.
Do we have to stop using Excel?
No, and you shouldn't. Keep Excel for budgets and quick analysis. Power BI takes over the recurring reports. You can even analyse a Power BI dataset in Excel with a pivot table, so finance teams don't lose their favourite tool.
How long does a first dashboard take?
With one or two reasonably clean data sources, anywhere from a few days to two weeks. Messy data adds time, because most of the effort goes into cleaning and connecting data, not drawing charts.
The Bottom Line
Don't switch to Power BI because it looks more modern. Switch when the same reports eat days of someone's time every month, when meetings turn into arguments about whose numbers are right, or when one person leaving would leave you blind. If none of that is happening, Excel is doing its job. If some of it is, start with one report and let the results make the case.
Not sure which side of the line you're on? We work with small and medium businesses in Cyprus and Greece and are happy to take a look at your current reports. See our Power BI and BI services or get in touch.
About the author
Data Superheroes helps SMEs build analytics systems: data pipelines, warehouses, dashboards, and AI automation.