How to Move Credit Hire Off Spreadsheets

Moving credit hire off spreadsheets works best one workflow at a time, starting with whichever spreadsheet gets copied from most often. You pick the single process that causes the most re-keying, move that into a system with a proper audit trail, run both side by side for a couple of weeks, then retire the sheet. Operators who try to move everything at once are the ones most likely to end up back in Excel.

Here is what sits behind that, and what it costs to leave it.

What actually breaks first when credit hire runs on spreadsheets

The first thing to break is never the spreadsheet. It is the link between the spreadsheet and everything else.

A credit hire file lives in more places than most operations realise. There is the master tracker, the hire agreement, the rate schedule, the email thread with the repairer, the engineer's report, the correspondence with the third party insurer, and somebody's notes. The spreadsheet holds the summary. Everything else holds the detail. And the only thing keeping them in step is a handler remembering to update all of them.

That works fine at low volumes. It starts to slip as the book grows, and the slips are expensive rather than annoying. A hire period that ran three days past the authorised date because nobody flagged it. A rate applied from last quarter's schedule. A mitigation question that cannot be answered eighteen months later because the evidence was in an inbox rather than on the file.

None of those are spreadsheet failures. They are what happens when the record of the claim is spread across six places and the person holding it together is busy.

Why credit hire breaks spreadsheets faster than other claims work

Credit hire has a moving part that most claims work does not: the clock.

Almost every other element of a motor claim is a fact that settles. Liability resolves to a position. The repair cost is what it is. Credit hire is different because the value of the claim changes every single day the vehicle is on hire, and every one of those days has to be justified later against need, period and mitigation, rate, impecuniosity and the enforceability of the agreement. You are not recording a fact. You are maintaining a running position that has to withstand challenge months down the line.

A spreadsheet is a snapshot. Credit hire needs a timeline. That mismatch is why credit hire teams outgrow spreadsheets faster than repair or personal injury teams do, and why the workaround is always another spreadsheet.

What to move first, and what to leave where it is

Move the work that is repetitive, rules-based and resource-intensive. That test is set out properly in the 3Rs framework, so we will not repeat it here. What follows is how it applies specifically to the spreadsheets.

In practice that usually means:

• The rate and period record, because it is referenced constantly and challenged later
• Hire authorisation, because it follows fixed rules and touches every file
• Standard correspondence, because handlers are rewriting the same letter with different names in it
• Document chasing, because it is pure repetition with a deadline attached
• Anything that involves copying a reference number from one screen into another

Leave the judgement work alone. Liability arguments, decisions about whether to intervene, the judgement calls inside a third party insurer (TPI) dispute, conversations with a customer who has just been told their hire is ending. Those need a handler who understands the case. Automating them is how you end up with a system your best people work around.

Note the line falls inside the TPI workflow, not around it. Triaging incoming TPI correspondence and drafting the standard response is repetitive and rules-based, so it moves. Deciding what argument to run on a contested file does not.

The distinction matters because it sets expectations correctly. You are not replacing your team. You are giving them back the time they currently spend being a copy-and-paste machine.

What the move actually looked like for one operator

At Dash Claims, tasks that had been taking 35 to 40 minutes came down to around five.

Dash Claims came to us with a system that worked, up to a point. It covered the basics but it did not reflect how the business actually ran, particularly around dual control vehicles and the workflows attached to them. And too much of the day was still manual: copying information between screens, building separate emails, handling the same admin repeatedly.

Sandy Hillan at Dash Claims described the result plainly.

"Before KinClaims, some tasks were taking us 35 to 40 minutes because we were copying and pasting across different screens and emails. Now the system pulls everything through automatically and the same process takes around five minutes." Sandy Hillan, Dash Claims.

It is worth being precise about where that came from. Nobody got faster at making decisions. The decisions were never the slow part. What disappeared was the mechanical work between the decisions, which is where the gain sits whenever re-keying dominates the day.

The full story is in the Dash Claims case study, including what they asked for and what changed.

How long it takes, and what waiting actually costs

Plan in weeks per workflow rather than months for the whole operation.

A single well-defined workflow can usually be configured, tested and running inside a few weeks, parallel-running included. What stretches the timeline is rarely the software. It is data cleaning, and it is almost always worse than expected, because years of a shared spreadsheet means inconsistent date formats, three spellings of the same repairer and a column somebody added in 2023 that nobody can explain.

That is an argument for starting sooner, not for waiting until things calm down. The spreadsheet gets messier every month you leave it, and the cost of the move goes up with it.

The cost of waiting is harder to see because it does not arrive as an invoice. It shows up as hire periods that ran longer than they should have, rates that were not the current ones, evidence that could not be produced when a third party insurer asked for it, and handlers spending their week on admin instead of the cases that need arguing.

The move, in order

• One. Pick the one spreadsheet everything else depends on. Every operation has one and everybody knows which it is.
• Two. Write down what it actually does, including the bits that only live in one person's head.
• Three. Configure that single workflow properly, with the audit trail built in rather than added later.
• Four. Run both in parallel for a fortnight. Not longer, or the old sheet never dies.
• Five. Switch the spreadsheet off, then pick the next one.

Five steps, repeated. It is deliberately unglamorous, and that is why it works.

If you want to see what this looks like on a real desk rather than in a diagram, have a look at what the platform does or ask us for a walkthrough built around your own workflows. We would rather show you your process than ours.