Spreadsheet vs CPD app: an honest comparison

We make a CPD tracker, so treat this with appropriate suspicion. But the honest answer is that a spreadsheet is fine for a good number of people, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

When a spreadsheet is genuinely fine

• You have one registration with one straightforward requirement
• You log maybe ten to twenty activities a year
• You are comfortable with formulas and will actually build a SUM
• You keep it somewhere that survives a laptop change - personal cloud storage, not a work drive
• You are disciplined enough to open it without a prompt

If all five are true, a spreadsheet will get you through audit perfectly well. Regulators do not care about the format. They care about the content.

Where spreadsheets fall over

Location. The most common CPD disaster is not a bad record - it is a good record on a work OneDrive you lost access to on your last day, or an old laptop, or a corrupted file with no version history.

Friction. Opening a spreadsheet, finding the right tab, inserting a row and filling six columns is a five-minute job that feels like fifteen on a Tuesday night. Missed entries almost always come down to friction, not intent.

Totals that drift. Someone inserts a row outside the SUM range and the total is quietly wrong for eight months. Nobody notices until it matters.

Categories. Tracking participatory versus non-participatory hours in a spreadsheet means a second formula, and most people never add it.

Reflection. Reflection in a spreadsheet cell is miserable to write and worse to read back, so it tends not to get written.

Sharing. Sending an appraiser a raw spreadsheet is not a great look, and building a presentable version is another job.

What an app actually adds

Speed of entry, automatic totals against a target, proper reflection fields, category tagging that keeps subtotals honest, filtering, and a clean export that looks like evidence rather than a working file. Plus persistence - it is still there when your job, laptop and employer have all changed.

What an app does not fix

It does not make you log things. Nothing does except habit. If you would not open the spreadsheet, a slicker interface only helps at the margins - though a ninety-second entry does clear a lower bar than a five-minute one.

The reasonable conclusion

If the spreadsheet is working, keep it. Move it off your work drive today, add a SUM you trust, and add a reflection column.

If it is not working - and for most people it stopped working somewhere around the second missed quarter - the problem is friction and ownership, and that is exactly what a dedicated tool is for.

Keep your CPD in one place

A record only helps if it exists before you need it. Our free CPD tracker logs an activity in seconds, tallies your hours automatically, keeps your reflections with the entry, and exports a clean PDF whenever you need evidence. Free for life for individuals - and the record belongs to you, not your employer.