This firm ditched Excel, profit up 25% - why did they wait so long?

A 10-person structural and MEP firm in Florida switched off Excel for project tracking and saw 25% profit growth. Not revenue. Profit. Their VP put it pretty bluntly: "We had no idea what projects really made in terms of profit."

We hear that exact sentiment constantly. Not some version of it. That sentence, almost word for word, from principals across the country.

Dynamic Engineering's story is the same one we see over and over. Site visits that never got logged. Deliverables that ran way over estimate. Nobody catching it because the spreadsheet said everything was fine. The problem with spreadsheets is that they feel like they're working right up until they're definitely not, and by then you've already given away the margin.

The error research on spreadsheets is worth sitting with. Peer-reviewed studies, independently replicated, put errors in roughly 94% of operational spreadsheets. And the majority aren't typos. They're logic errors, where the person building the formula misunderstood the problem entirely. The formula looks fine. The underlying assumption is wrong. For firms making billing decisions off those numbers, that's a real exposure.

Even setting aside dramatic spreadsheet failures, small tracking gaps compound quickly. A 10-person firm missing 15 minutes of billable time per person per day loses roughly 625 hours annually. At a $150 blended rate, that's close to $94k a year. Not from any obvious mistake. Just from "small" misses that never get caught.

After the switch, Dynamic Engineering went from guessing at profitability to seeing it in real time. Recovered hours they'd been absorbing as overhead. Hit 2x improvement on deadline confidence. Leadership actually started growing the business instead of just managing it.

They're not alone in the numbers. Zweig Group has documented similar transitions at other firms hitting 6% firm-wide profitability improvements in about a year. So the range we're seeing is roughly 6-25% profitability improvement, depending on how much was leaking before.

Worth noting: Zweig Group themselves say that project management performance doesn't improve just because you bought new software. That tracks with what we see working with 1,800+ firms. The gains come from the operational change the new system makes possible, not from the feature list itself. Firms that just swap tools without changing how they track and bill work don't see these results.

Curious what people here are actually running. Still primarily on spreadsheets for project financials, or have you made the move? And if you switched, did the profitability improvements show up as quickly as these case studies suggest, or was there a rougher transition period nobody talks about?