What did they use instead of spreadsheets? Especially the non-technical staff.
It only makes sense of you can convince people.
There was thrift in my hometown, that was using excel to decide on the max credit for individuals. The document was copied and forked and the outcome was more random than anything. At least they could be convinced to introduce a database and a well written and maintained application, that does reliable work and provides the same output when given the same input.