Ten years of weeks, kept in order.

How Square-1 Engineering chose to replace a spreadsheet with custom software after ten years of operations on one very good workbook, and what the first month actually looked like.

Every week at Square-1 Engineering ran on the same rhythm. Consultants in the field sent in their hours from Friday to Monday. On Tuesday, Trisha Aure, Sr. Director of Operations & Delivery, ran payroll. On Wednesday and Thursday, founder and managing director Travis Smith sent invoices.

All of it ran through one spreadsheet. A tab for every metric and every project. Formulas reaching across tabs to roll up gross profit and revenue by week and by project, exactly the way Travis reads his business. Time cards arrived as PDFs by email and were keyed in by hand. Every new project meant adjusting formulas. Every new year meant two to four days building next year’s workbook. “We’ve been using that for 10 years,” Travis says.

The spreadsheet was good. When Corymb migrated it, we found four discrepancies in the entire dataset. Four.

Brittany Clapp

Corymb co-founder

“Honestly it was truly impressive, going through the data they had very few errors based on how complex the spreadsheet was.”

That was the problem, too: a spreadsheet that clean stays clean only because somebody keeps it that way.

“It worked well so long as the people who knew the tool were using it,” Travis says. The spreadsheet “was 100% reliant on [Trisha] and I in order for the company to operate…

Travis Smith

Founder and managing director, Square-1 Engineering

“[…] We could not pass that tool off to somebody else without an enormous amount of training and what I would imagine probably a bunch of issues. So we were almost kind of captive by our own process in a way, despite the fact that it worked.”

Why no tool could replace the spreadsheet

Travis had already gone looking for a way out.

“Still to this day, I’ve not met a tool that could do what our Excel spreadsheet did,” he says. “Which is why we stayed in that Excel spreadsheet for so long. I can’t even begin to tell you how frustrating that experience was. I mean the amount of time that I spent over a couple of years talking with different tool owners […] These are big companies. And the fact that they couldn’t do that was really frustrating.”

Part of the issue was size. Square-1 is “not a tiny company, but we’re also not a medium sized company,” as Travis puts it. “So what that ultimately means is we are a part of a market where most tools are not made for.”

Enterprise platforms could, in theory, be bent into shape, but “the amount of customization that’s required to get there is monstrous and just not worth it.” He’s also watched plenty of companies buy software “way overmatched for who they are,” then use “like 40% of the tool’s capability.”

“Finding the tool that is appropriate for your organization is really challenging,” he says.

The other part was the business itself. Some consultants are paid directly, some through staffing firms. Some work across several client companies; some clients run several projects at once. Travis wanted his numbers shown his way. A generic tool would ask Square-1 to change how it works.

That’s where Corymb started: build around the way Square-1 already works, then add what the spreadsheet never could.

The missing noun

Colin Willis, Corymb’s other co-founder, doesn’t think of a workbook like Travis’s as a spreadsheet at all. “The spreadsheet was always a data model,” he says, and a record of every model before it, as the business grew. He keeps similar ones for his own family’s budget and retirement planning.

Colin Willis

Corymb co-founder

“There’s something very human about what a spreadsheet lets someone do, simply because it’s so flexible.”

Colin says. That flexibility is also what makes it fragile: “move a column, accidentally overwrite a formula, nest lookup within lookup,” and changing anything becomes a nearly impossible task.

Mapping Travis’s workbook turned up something it didn’t have. It had clients and consultants, and “projects” that existed only as a pairing of a particular client with a particular consultant. There was no project as a thing in its own right. The software needed one, so Corymb created it. That gave Square-1 something new: projects with their own identity, projects grouped under a client, and every piece of business with one client rolled up into a single view. It was analysis Travis “knew he wanted to do, but he couldn’t do in his spreadsheet without rewriting everything,” Colin says.

What it took to replace a spreadsheet with custom software

SQR1 OPS is a web app with separate logins for admins, sales reps, and consultants. Consultants log hours straight to the ledger, and the numbers flow on to payroll, invoicing, and the dashboards.

It was built with AI, carefully. “It wasn’t a vibe coded app,” Colin says. Corymb started with written specifications for the front end, the back end, and how data moves between them, drawn from the spreadsheet and from interviews with Travis and his team. A clickable mockup built in Claude Design went to Travis for feedback before any real code existed. The build itself ran in Claude Code, with a testing plan that had the AI write and run unit tests at every step, using VS Code and GitHub, with Supabase as the database and Vercel for hosting. On this project Brittany drove the build and Colin coached the workflow. (They swap those seats depending on the job.)

Then came the testing: some twenty hours of people working through hundreds of scenarios on fake data before anything real touched it.

Colin Willis

Corymb co-founder

“It’s easier than ever to build something, but the time to test it and make it right is still roughly the same as it has ever been.”

The brutal week

Square-1 could only pause its process for one short window, Tuesday through Thursday of a week Travis was on vacation. It was also a week Colin was tied up in back-to-back meetings with another client. He ran the Python migration script between meetings; Brittany checked each load; he adjusted the script until it was right. The deadline was fixed: live by Friday, August 21, before the next payroll run.

Colin traces the migration problems to “the human element of the data.” A consultant who got a raise partway through a project. A goal changed mid-quarter. A formula fixed in one tab but not another. These are “all these little things you can do in a spreadsheet but stop working when you structure all of your data in a database.” Each one called for a quick judgment, and each was logged so Square-1 could review it.

Week one, and the week that hadn’t ended yet

SQR1 OPS went live on schedule with 25 users: 22 consultants, two admins, and one sales rep. The rough edge was email. Most of Square-1’s consultants are employed by other firms, and getting invitations through corporate firewalls was the one part of the system that couldn’t be tested until it was live. Square-1 sent over an issue or three; Corymb fixed them the same day. By the end of the first week, the whole team was using it.

A couple of weeks in, Travis noticed something he hadn’t requested.

“I was in the tool doing invoicing and I all of a sudden noticed, I was like, wait, hold on a second. Why is there data in the tool for a week we haven’t even concluded yet?”

His consultants were logging hours day by day, and the numbers were landing as they were entered.

Travis Smith

Founder and managing director, Square-1 Engineering

“It wasn’t 100% in real time, but far closer to real time than what we’ve ever had.”

Now Trisha can check who has and hasn’t submitted hours before the week closes.

“The thing that is probably the best is the fact that everything’s automated,” Travis says. “Assuming we do our job at the beginning well, meaning putting the new project in … the fact that everything’s automated with people being able to upload their time cards, and no longer doing PDFs via e-mail. That’s definitely a win.”

What carries it now

Colin thinks matching the old workflow got the tool adopted. What keeps it in use is something else: “The thing that still carries it is what they’re imagining.”

People who run a business out of a spreadsheet are, in his words, “too embedded, saturated with context, and can’t see what’s possible, and they probably don’t have time to think about it.” Once the tool is in front of them, that changes.

At Square-1, it already has. A month in, the team is already bringing ideas for what the tool should do next. PTO tracking is under discussion, along with moving a historical SharePoint spreadsheet of past projects and customer inquiries into the tool. SQR1 OPS will keep growing with the business.

For ten years, the business depended on the two people who could carry its spreadsheet. Now that knowledge lives in a tool the whole team can use, and the two of them are free to think about what comes next.

Corymb builds custom software for small businesses around the way they already work. If your business runs on a spreadsheet only one or two people really understand, and you are ready to replace a spreadsheet with custom software, talk to us.