Spreadsheets are a great general-purpose solution for digitally recording and organizing information. As your needs grow, you can add tabs, increasingly complex formulas, visualizations, and more. So when your organization needs to start keeping records of new types of data for new purposes—like sustainability reporting—it’s tempting (and common) to turn to them.
According to a 2025 MIT study, half of North American enterprises “still rely primarily on spreadsheets” to track emissions, compared to just 33% of European firms, which more commonly use specialized solutions.
But as you or your sustainability leaders have probably already noticed, spreadsheets have some pretty serious limitations in niche applications. And they get worse at scale. Still, suppose your organization is simply trying to check a box for investors or regulators, or you’re just beginning to see the value of sustainability management. If that’s the case, it can be hard to justify adding another dedicated solution to your tech stack.
Yet when you factor in the extra time you spend compiling, analyzing, and auditing your sustainability data, the “free option” is anything but. Here are the main ways spreadsheets fall short, and how a dedicated sustainability management solution saves you time and resources.
Spreadsheet solutions don’t integrate with your utility providers
When you use Excel, Google Sheets, or another spreadsheet solution for sustainability management, you’re committing to manually importing your energy data from each provider. Every time you need to analyze, audit, or report current data, you need to go back into each provider’s portal to retrieve the data and update your spreadsheets. For each location. That’s a tedious, time-consuming, ongoing commitment that runs the risk of human errors.
Dedicated sustainability management software like Tango Energy & Sustainability integrates directly with your utility providers, automatically ingests your utility bills, and consolidates them into a single dashboard. It even reformats the data for you—which brings us to the next challenge with using spreadsheets.
Utility data isn’t standardized
The bigger your portfolio, the more likely you are to have numerous utility providers. And each of these providers has its own system for formatting invoices and utility data or requires different line items. So as you extract that data for your spreadsheet, it’s not a simple matter of copy-pasting or importing a sheet. You have to translate the data so you can actually use it. Every bill, every building, every time.
You’ll never waste time on formatting with the right dedicated solution. Not only does Tango Energy & Sustainability automatically intake your utility bills, but it also automatically standardizes your utility data, so it’s ready to analyze and report on.
Spreadsheets don’t automatically track Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions
Even if you aren’t yet legally obligated to track Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, investors increasingly rely on emissions data as an indicator of your commitment to and potential for long-term growth. So unsurprisingly, tracking emissions is one of the main reasons to collect and aggregate your utility data.
With a spreadsheet, you can build out complicated formulas and dependencies to convert fuel and energy consumption into carbon equivalent emissions using the GHG Protocol’s corporate standards (including separate calculations for the location-based method and market-based method). But every time you add new data, locations, or emissions sources, or change calculation methods to fit new sustainability goals or capabilities, you risk breaking the formula or introducing errors to your analysis.
Tango was built for this exact use case. It automatically performs these calculations and tracks your emissions in the background. Adding new emission sources and data is simple, and if you want to switch between methods for Scope 3 emissions, you can make that change without creating problems with your database.
Spreadsheets don’t automatically satisfy disclosure requirements
For many organizations, compliance with disclosure requirements is the greatest challenge with sustainability management. Beyond aggregating and standardizing data and performing carbon accounting calculations, you have to format everything according to standards like GRESB or CDP and generate your sustainability report.
A spreadsheet won’t do that for you. But sustainability management software will. Different solutions may only have built-in compliance with certain standards, but you can generally expect these to be the most widely used ones, and better solutions will be compliant with a wider range of standards. Tango integrates directly with ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, LEED Arc, GRESB, CDP, and more.
Spreadsheets don’t audit your data
Raw sustainability data is notoriously inaccurate and difficult to work with. Businesses spend significant time and resources auditing their data through third parties not just because of the high stakes of sustainability reporting, but due to the proliferation of errors in sustainability databases. In fact, according to EY, 96% of finance leaders report having problems with their nonfinancial reporting data.
Spreadsheets won’t help you with any of these data challenges. If anything, they introduce new opportunities for errors with manual data entry, problems with formula configuration, and the potential for version control issues.
Tango Energy & Sustainability goes beyond simply standardizing and aggregating your data—it automatically audits your data for common errors like duplicate entries and gaps in billing periods, reducing the time you’ll spend on third-party audits and giving you greater confidence in your data accuracy.
Spreadsheets don’t have AI-assisted forecasting
Spreadsheet solutions like Excel and Google Sheets certainly have forecasting capabilities. But these capabilities aren’t built for the scale and complexity of forecasting emissions, costs, and energy needs for your portfolio and individual locations. Some of AI’s greatest strengths are processing vast amounts of data (structured and unstructured), recognizing complex patterns (not just historical trends), and accounting for external factors (like weather). And you’re just not going to get that from today’s spreadsheet solutions.
While spreadsheet software is increasingly adding basic AI capabilities to their tools, they are general-purpose AI, and not trained on or specialized in the specific kinds of data needed for forecasting. As you budget for energy expenses and set sustainability targets, sustainability management software’s AI-assisted forecasting gives you a far more accurate look into the future.
Spreadsheets don’t provide real-time visibility and automated monitoring
A spreadsheet solution isn’t connected to your utility meters or utility providers. You see your data when you look at your provider’s invoice. So when a location (or your entire portfolio) is experiencing anomalous energy consumption, you won’t know until after the fact. And even then, you may not recognize that there’s a problem, because you’ll have to analyze the data yourself.
Tango Energy & Sustainability detects anomalies and notifies you as they happen. By directly integrating with your utility infrastructure, you also get real-time visibility into costs, emissions, and usage.
Spreadsheets don’t translate bills and data from other languages
Not every business operates internationally. But for those that do, manual sustainability management becomes significantly more time-consuming and difficult. The more languages your bills arrive in, the more tedious it becomes to understand and consolidate your energy data in a spreadsheet.
With energy and sustainability software, utility providers’ invoices can be automatically translated to your preferred language upon intake. So as your operations expand, your data processes don’t need to change or add on expensive or error-prone translation services.
Say goodbye to spreadsheets with Tango Energy & Sustainability
Spreadsheet tools weren’t built for the complexities of sustainability management. Using them means making an ongoing commitment to manually compiling, analyzing, reformatting, auditing, and reporting on a database that will only become increasingly complex as your organization grows.
Sustainability management software like Tango Energy & Sustainability is designed to make the entire process easier from end-to-end, delivering sharper insights and greater clarity without the tedium of manual processes.
Want to see what Tango Energy & Sustainability can do for you?
Request a demo today.
