Should you manage school equipment with Excel?

Many schools choose Excel as their tool for managing students. The underlying reason is that they lack the budget and time to research specialized software to help care for thousands of students. However, this tool only suits the early stage and small schools with few students. If your school is likely to expand and student numbers are growing fast, then can you manage school equipment with Excel? Let's Mona Media find the exact answer in this article!

What is Excel-based equipment management software?

For those who don't know, Excel-based equipment management software is widely used in businesses. It is a dedicated tool for tracking and taking inventory of a company's machines, equipment and assets. Managing equipment with Excel lets users carry out operations and store accurate, detailed equipment data along with its financial information.

How to manage equipment with Excel

To track and manage equipment effectively in Excel, you need to equip yourself with some basic knowledge of it. The key points are:

• Operations in Excel
• File handling operations such as copying data, inserting and deleting columns, naming data ranges and setting values.
• Actions print handling, spreadsheet formatting

Some functions everyone should know when using Excel to manage equipment:

• Sum (SUM)
• Conditional function (SUMIF)
• Multiplication function (PRODUCT)
• Average value (AVERAGE)
• Smallest or largest value functions (MIN, MAX)

Besides knowing Excel well enough to manage equipment effectively, you also need to build the following content in the file:

• Duration
• Equipment code
• Equipment name
• Volume

Drawbacks of using Excel to manage school equipment

Using Excel-based school equipment management software is very popular, but it still has drawbacks, and organizations are looking for ways around them. Understanding these drawbacks well will help you minimize errors during your work.

Weak management capability

Maintenance management is an indispensable part of any business plan. Continuously updated data helps technicians assess the machinery system better, and from there set suitable maintenance and servicing plans.

Even so, an Excel file is limited to 65,000 rows. This is a limitation for schools with many students and large organizations when they update detailed information on their machinery and equipment.

As a result, many organizations choose to split the information into separate files. This makes the information more detailed and accurate and easier to store. On the flip side, it makes data harder for staff to manage, because searching, changing and updating information takes a lot of time.

Low security and safety

Schools today typically use Excel tools to manage equipment in one of two ways: distributed management or centralized management. In distributed management, each person works separately. Everyone uses a different Excel file, and the files are then consolidated.

This approach doesn't guarantee consistent, synchronized reports. It also takes a lot of time, and the equipment tracking sheet can even be affected if something goes wrong.

The other form is centralized management. Centralized management means the whole department uses one file kept in a designated folder. This causes problems when two people open the file to edit it. If both open the file to edit information for machine A, and one saves first while the other saves later, the Excel file keeps only one person's changes and loses the other's. This is the cause of inconsistent information.

From this you can see that maintenance and asset management in Excel files are far from easy. Doing it well requires staff who understand Excel and its formulas thoroughly.

Prone to errors when exporting reports

When exporting reports, checking many data files at once demands high accuracy. Staff who don't know Excel well, lack the expertise or work with messy storage files can easily produce wrong reports.

Excel-based school equipment management software can sometimes give users a headache because it holds so many statistics, especially in technical fields that need absolute numerical accuracy.

Benefits of using school management software instead of Excel

Benefits that a school gets when it uses school equipment management software instead Excel are:

• Synchronized storage of the program and curriculum information list. All information about teachers and students is gathered in a single tool, which makes management more effective and prevents data loss.
• Management software creates a smooth workflow, so staff and teachers know exactly what their duties are. This helps avoid needless errors during rollout.
• With management software, a school can closely follow work progress of its teachers and understand students' levels to choose suitable teaching methods and raise the quality of education.
• Management software also steers everyone toward a highly professional working environment, saving both manpower and time in operations.
• All data is kept safe and secure in the school management software.

School equipment management software: MONA LMS

Using school equipment management software brings many significant benefits, such as making management easier, reducing costly losses and limiting errors. That said, not every piece of software is high quality or meets a school's requirements well.

Schools can consider MONA LMS education software , a leading solution for managing a school's educational activities in one place. The standout strengths of MONA LMS management software are:

• With just one system, it manages every school operation well, including students, teachers, educational equipment, exams, finance, online learning, income and expenses and more.
• MONA LMS helps manage effectively and optimize every kind of cost.
• In particular, it is fully equipped with the dedicated features needed for managing teaching equipment . These features can be designed and adjusted on request to fit each school's education model.

The strengths that MONA LMS software offers will help schools use the software effectively and get the most out of it, avoiding the situation of having good, feature-rich software that can't actually be used.

MONA LMS suits many different school models, campuses and education centers. The system comes with more than 1,000 features and 50 built-in configurations. Data security in this software is also guaranteed at the highest level.

We hope the information that Mona Media provided in the article above gives you an answer on whether management software is necessary, and clears up your questions: Should you manage school equipment with Excel?