Enterprise workflow

Most internal software is a spreadsheet that outgrew itself, and the migration path matters more than the feature list. Someone built a workbook that became load-bearing, then added tabs and formulas until it broke in ways that are now company-wide. Replacing it is less about building the obvious features than about finding the six undocumented rules living in conditional formatting, and the two exceptions that one person handles manually every month without telling anyone.

Approvals are the most requested feature and the most commonly over-modelled. Organisations describe elaborate multi-level chains, and what actually happens is that two people approve almost everything and a third is consulted for large amounts. Building the elaborate version produces a system people route around; building the real one, with a clear escalation and a delegation path for when someone is on holiday, produces one they use. The holiday case is not an edge case — it is the reason approval systems get abandoned.

Audit trails are worth building properly from the start because they cannot be reconstructed later. Who changed what, when, and what the previous value was — that is a different data model from simply storing the current state, and adding it after the fact means the history before that day does not exist. For anything touching money, access or regulated decisions, that gap is the one nobody can close.