Comparison
Running an agency on spreadsheets
Most education agencies start in a spreadsheet and many should stay there. This page is about the specific points at which one stops working, and how to tell whether you have reached them.
What a spreadsheet is better at
Everything about the first year. It costs nothing, everyone already knows it, it does not need to be configured before it is useful, and it will hold any shape of information you invent at four in the afternoon.
It is also faster than any software for the thing agencies actually do most: looking at a list and sorting it. A counsellor who wants to see every student going to Canada in September, sorted by deposit paid, gets there in about six seconds. No product beats that, and products that claim to have usually hidden the list behind three filters.
Anyone who tells you a spreadsheet is the wrong tool from day one is selling something.
Where it stops working
- 01
Two people open the same file
Shared sheets survive two counsellors. They rarely survive five, plus a part-time visa officer, plus an owner who reorganises the columns on a Sunday. The failure is not dramatic - nothing crashes. A row gets overwritten, nobody notices for three weeks, and a student's deposit date is now wrong with no way to find out what it used to be.
- 02
A family disputes what they were told
A parent says they were promised the fee included the visa application. Your counsellor remembers otherwise. A spreadsheet holds the current value of every cell and no history of any of them, so there is nothing to look at. What settles this is a record of what was shown to whom and when - which is a different shape of thing entirely, not a column you forgot to add.
- 03
A deadline does not chase you
A CAS expires. A provincial attestation runs out. A student's passport is valid for four months less than the course. Every one of these is knowable in advance and none of them is visible in a grid of two hundred rows unless somebody looks that day. The work is not tracking the dates; it is being told about them.
- 04
Commission from eleven institutions
One pays per enrolment, one pays a percentage after census, one pays in two instalments, and one sent a remittance that is short by four hundred dollars with no explanation. Reconciling that in a spreadsheet is possible and takes a weekend a month. The number nobody has is the one that matters: how much you are owed right now, by whom, and which of it is late.
Side by side
| What you are doing | Spreadsheet | Visatory |
|---|---|---|
| See the list, sort the list | Immediate, and better than most software | Fast, with saved views per counsellor |
| Two people editing at once | Works until about five people | Every change is one person's, recorded |
| What was this student told, and when | Not recorded | Timeline per student, including the fee sentence they saw |
| Being warned before a deadline | Somebody has to look | Milestones with owners and warnings when one goes stale |
| Commission owed, across institutions | A monthly reconciliation by hand | A ledger with what is expected, confirmed, invoiced and received |
| Evidence for an accreditation review | Assembled in the week before | Kept as you work, exported as one pack |
| A counsellor leaves | Their files and their memory leave too | The case is in the system; the handover is a reassignment |
| Cost | Effectively nothing | From $49 a month |
When you should stay on a spreadsheet
If you place fewer than about twenty students a year, with one or two counsellors, and you are not being asked for evidence by an accreditation body, a spreadsheet is genuinely the right tool and a subscription is a cost with no matching benefit.
The same is true if your problem is that you do not have enough students. Software does not produce students. An agency that buys a CRM hoping it will fix a lead problem has bought the wrong thing, and will be able to tell you so in about four months.
The point to move is not a number of students. It is the first time you cannot answer a question about your own file: what was this family told, when did we last chase this, how much is that institution behind.
What moving actually involves
Your spreadsheet is the import format. Upload it, map the columns once, and the rows come in with whatever you already recorded; anything that does not map is left in a note rather than dropped.
The part that takes real time is not the data, it is deciding who owns which student and what your own stages are called. That is an afternoon for most agencies and it is work you would have to do eventually anyway.
See it against your own file
Start a trial and import your own sheet on the first day: the importer reads Excel and CSV, matches columns by their headings in English or Vietnamese, and lists every row it could not use and why. The demo is a real workspace with invented students in it. Or bring a copy of your spreadsheet to a call and we will tell you honestly whether you are at the point of moving.