Flotly or Excel: when should you really switch tools?

Short answer

Excel remains relevant as long as you are the only one entering data, with fewer than about ten vehicles, no online booking and no damage disputes. Five signs mean it is time to switch: a double booking has already happened, two people edit the file at the same time, you still take payment by bank transfer or cash on arrival, you have given up charging for damage for lack of evidence, or you spend more than three hours a week re-entering data. Below those thresholds, switching tools will cost you more than it brings in.

Key facts

• Excel has no functional limit: its limits are simultaneous editing, evidence and payment collection.
• Five switching signs: double booking, concurrent editing, manual payment collection, lost dispute, chronic re-entry.
• The real cost of switching is not the subscription: it is cleaning the data and building new habits.
• Flotly starts at €39 excl. VAT/month, with a 7-day trial, so you can test it without staking your season on it.

What Excel does better than software, and it should be said

• It costs nothing more than what you already pay, and it never stops working for lack of payment.
• It bends to any business rule, including yours, including the strangest. No software matches that flexibility.
• You already know how to use it. Training costs nothing, which is never the case with a new tool.
• Your data stays with you, in a format everyone can read, with no dependence on a vendor.

A software vendor that claims Excel “is useless” disqualifies itself. Spreadsheets have kept a great many rental businesses running, and still do.

The five signs that it is time to switch

1. You have already had a double booking. One is enough: it cost a customer, a refund, sometimes a negative review. A spreadsheet locks nothing.
2. You are no longer the only one entering data. From the second person on, the shared version drifts, someone works on a copy, and a booking disappears.
3. You still take payment on arrival. Without online payment, a reserved slot is not a sold slot, and late cancellations are at your expense.
4. You have given up charging for damage because you had no comparable photo from pick-up. It is the costliest sign, and the one most often kept quiet.
5. You spend more than three hours a week copying the same information from a file into a rental agreement, then into an invoice.

An honest comparison, point by point

Stay with Excel if...

• You have fewer than five vehicles, you work alone, and you have never had a dispute.
• Your business is seasonal over a few weeks a year: an annual subscription would be paid for nothing.
• Your model relies on very particular rules that no standard software will model: in that case, software will cost you in flexibility what it gives you in rigour.

Disclosure: this page is published by the company behind Flotly. We have an interest in you switching tools. That is precisely why the three cases above are written in black and white: a rental business that switches too early cancels after two months, and that helps no one.

If you decide to switch: the method

1. Clean the file before importing. One column per data item, a single date format, no merged cells, no comments in the margins. That is 80% of the work.
2. Migrate the fleet and rates first, not the history. The history can stay in the spreadsheet, read-only.
3. Run both in parallel for one to two weeks, on new bookings only.
4. Switch over on a clean cut-off date, ideally in the low season, and archive the spreadsheet without deleting it.

Frequently asked questions

Can you import an Excel file into Flotly?

Yes, Flotly offers fleet import from a file. The quality of the result depends entirely on how clean the source file is: one column per data item, a single date format.

How long does the switch take?

Setup is guided and needs no installation; how long it takes depends on the size of your fleet. Data cleaning, on the other hand, depends on the state of your file: that is where the time really goes.

What happens to my Excel file after the migration?

Keep it. Archive it read-only as a history: it is your safety net and, in the event of an audit, your record of past financial years.

Is Excel GDPR compliant?

A spreadsheet in itself is neither compliant nor non-compliant: your use of it is what counts. A file containing copies of driving licences, stored without access control or a retention period, does however pose a real problem.

Further reading

• Which software should you use to manage a vehicle rental fleet?
• Comparison of vehicle rental management software