Table of Contents

1. Pros of Excel
2. Cons of Excel
3. Conclusion

Advantages of Using Spreadsheets for Staffing 

Accessibility and Familiarity

At Teamwork, we cut our teeth professionally with Excel and understand why everyone starts with it. It is so familiar and easy to begin using to so many professionals, whether its staffers, recruiters, intake coordinators, or even clinical directors. Its interface allows ABA organizations to create customized fields to show name, availability, geography (center or home), schedules, and some basic preferences (i.e. client needs therapist experienced with challenging behaviors). Most of all, it is incredibly quick to update, which is a fundamental component of ABA scheduling as both providers and families are constantly changing their availability.

Cost Efficiency

At first glance, using Excel seems cost-effective because it’s often already a part of the company’s suite of products. There are no extra costs associated and if you do end up needing to add Excel for another scheduler, it’s under $10 per month.

Customization and Flexibility

Excel can be configured for whatever use case you have. Block scheduling, home or center-based staffing, Excel can help a bit. Moreover, that customization makes it possible to create a visual that has a decent amount of your data along with comments all in one tab. This flexibility allows for schedulers to make quick edits and see the impact to individual schedules quite quickly.

Transferrable

Excel can be simply sent by email or a HIPAA-compliant data transfer tool to another scheduler or operations person for review.

Drawbacks and Costs of Using Spreadsheets for Staffing 

Lack of Integration

Let’s be honest. Excel isn’t actually the only tool you’re using when staffing and scheduling. You likely have a CRM or practice management tool that you rely upon for your active and waitlisted clients. You may just have another excel file for your waitlist. You also likely have a phone system or email workflow to contact clients to give them updates to their schedules or to get updates on what their latest availability is or will be ahead of school/summer transitions. On the therapist side, there’s likely to be interaction with an Applicant Tracking System. There’s also project management tools that are helpful when considering when authorizations are due, and there’s billing solutions as well. Excel doesn’t integrate with anything and so it’s very prone to creating duplicative work relative to a staffing solution like Teamwork, which has open APIs and will integrate with any system that also allows for the seamless transfer of data.

Time Investment

Creating complex rules and schemas for matching in Excel requires a significant investment of time. How many people have really taken the time to master macros or complex iterative calculations to create strong match suggestions? While it might seem cost-effective in terms of only the software expenses of Excel, the labor cost associated with manually inputting, organizing, adjusting data and re-jigging Excel spreadsheets can be substantial. 

Error-Prone and Limited Automation

Excel-based scheduling heavily relies on manual data entry, which increases the risk of errors. Additionally, the lack of automation capabilities in Excel means that repetitive tasks, such as copying data or formulas across multiple cells and across multiple applications. There’s also an issue that data isn’t time-stamped and so if you don’t know add a comment about when a schedule was last updated, you may not actually know if the data you’re references is recent or stale. Most of all, it just doesn’t do all the things you need. It doesn’t contact families or therapists with updates to schedules. It can’t even automatically tell you what the commute time looks like. It can’t really suggest multiple matches across your region or center. Teamwork’s platform can do all of that.

No Prioritization

Microsoft Excel doesn’t point out when there’s a gap in a schedule or highlight which clients have draft schedules that are pending approvals. When you’re a smaller company, it’s easy to remember the stage and status of all the patients and therapists you’re working with. Once there are multiple team members and numerous clients, prioritizing the top tasks to complete gets harder. Having a dashboard for what steps need to get done in a day becomes important once the work starts piling up. 

Scalability and Maintenance

As the number of clients or complexity of schedules increases, maintaining and scaling schedules in Excel becomes more challenging. This can lead to increased time spent on administrative tasks and potential inefficiencies. For Teamwork, things started breaking once we had 20 therapists, 20 clients and 20 waitlisted families. It was too much to update all of the availability data we needed in Excel.

Opportunity Cost

While Excel might seem cost-effective in the short term, the opportunity cost of not investing in specialized scheduling software that offers automation, error reduction, and better scalability should also be considered. Users that have onboarded with Teamwork have grown their therapist utilization by 30%+, increased their census by 40%, and reduced their staffing speed down to a month. This is all within 6 months of using Teamwork. If Excel is getting in the way of more efficient growth, that means you’re leaving money on the table at the expense of your clients and employees.

Conclusion: When Have Other Companies Moved On?

While Excel is a convenient and familiar tool for creating ABA schedules, its use comes with hidden costs in terms of time, potential errors, and limited automation. As the field of ABA therapy continues to evolve, considering specialized ABA staffing software designed explicitly for ABA scheduling might prove to be a more cost-effective and efficient solution in the long run.

Here are the reasons people have stayed with Excel:

1. Small practice where everything can be done in a person’s head and Excel
2. Comfortable as is with limited plans to grow larger and/or faster
3. Need to put out other fires and can’t prioritize scheduling optimization
4. The organization hasn’t established defined workflows that can be repeatably automated

Rather than creating false urgency to tell you to leave Excel, here’s a list of why our customers have ditched Excel:

1. It’s just not manageable staffing with Excel once you’re serving over 25 patients
2. Investing in scheduling and staffing automation is cheaper than hiring another scheduler
3. Need to improve therapist utilization and retention (Teamwork’s retention improved 8% once we switched)
4. Experiencing strong growth and don’t want poor systems to get in the way
5. A desire to learn staffing and scheduling best practices from other ABA practices along with analytics to measure progress

While Excel serves as the ideal starting point, exploring dedicated ABA staffing software could significantly streamline the process, reduce human error, and ultimately provide faster, better quality of care for individuals receiving ABA therapy. Specialized software like Teamwork is built specifically to do a better job than Excel and will prove a strong ROI quickly! Teamwork was built to compliment the current platforms you use and replace the weakest link.

If you’re interested in learning what staffing and scheduling solutions are available for ABA providers, we’d love for you to reach out by scheduling a demo!

Interested in Teamwork? Schedule a Demo!

At Teamwork,we pride ourselves on being different from our competition. Teamwork is built specifically for ABA providers with a focus on clinical quality. We automate manual work associated with scheduling (e.g. calculating commute times) so your team can focus on what’s important: delivering quality care to your patients.

Interested? Fill out the form below to sign-up for a demo of our tool!

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