AN HONEST COMPARISON
The spreadsheet is free. Here's what it actually costs.
We're not going to pretend Excel doesn't work, we ran client renewals on it for years, and for a while it did. This page is what we learned about where it stops.
One account we managed, a multi-entity manufacturer, around thirty branches, not a huge business by national standards, ran on a workbook with seven tabs. Sixty-plus domains across twenty country registries. Thirty firewalls in eight different renewal cohorts. Microsoft licensing across three agreement types. Dell warranties by service tag, including production servers whose cover, the sheet quietly recorded, had expired years earlier and never been resolved. The exchange-rate question was literally row two.
And the IT lead who owned it told us the number that changed how we think: his biggest partner saw about 22% of his IT budget. He was managing fourteen partners, each with their own slice, each needing its own budget build, and the only complete picture of his obligations was that hand-built file.
| The spreadsheet | Renewals360 | |
|---|---|---|
| First warning | Whenever someone opens the file | Five months before, automatically |
| Ownership | Whoever's name is in column F | Named owner + escalation contact, enforced with windows |
| When the owner is on leave | Nothing happens | It escalates |
| The quote, PO and invoice | Three inboxes | One record, matched |
| Exchange-rate exposure | A guess made at budget time | Revalued daily at spot |
| Budget season | Three weeks of rebuilding | A snapshot, an uplift, an export |
| When the manager resigns | The knowledge leaves | The record stays |
| Audit trail | Track changes, sometimes | Every action, attributed, always |
| Bought through a cloud marketplace | Nobody external is watching at all | Tracked the same as everything else |
| Cost | “Free” | From R2 499/month |
The honest maths: one auto-renewed Microsoft commit at last year's seat count, or one uncovered server failure, costs more than a year of Renewals360. The spreadsheet isn't free. It's just unbilled.