AIPP vs. the spreadsheet
Where the spreadsheet is fine, and where it quietly stops being fine.
Not a pitch dressed as a comparison — a line-by-line, honest look at where a spreadsheet-based capital program genuinely holds up, and the specific points where it starts costing more than it saves.
| Spreadsheet | AIPP | |
|---|---|---|
| Small, stable register, one owner | Genuinely fine — no reason to change | Overkill; the spreadsheet wins here |
| Multiple asset classes, mixed condition scales | Every class quietly gets forced onto one curve | Each class scores on its own configured engine |
| "Why did this rank drop?" | Usually unanswerable without archaeology through old versions | Every score decomposes into its factors, on demand |
| Handover to a new planner | Tribal knowledge walks out the door with the last person who built it | The model, weights and history are the system, not one person's memory |
| Regulator evidence pack | Rebuilt by hand each cycle, often under time pressure | Generated from the same scored data that produced the ranking |
| Year-on-year comparison | Only if last year's version survived and nobody touched the formulas | Frozen baselines, diffed automatically |
| Incomplete or missing condition data | Usually defaults silently to a guess or a zero | Flagged and excluded, with the reason stated — never defaulted quietly |
| Cost to start | Free — already built | A scoped, fixed-fee pilot |
Where the spreadsheet wins outright: if your register is small, one person owns it and knows it well, nobody outside your team needs to independently trust the number, and you're not preparing evidence a regulator or auditor will scrutinise — keep the spreadsheet. Buying a tool to solve a problem you don't have yet is a worse decision than the spreadsheet ever was.
What breaks first, specifically: not the arithmetic — the spreadsheet can usually still add and multiply correctly. What breaks first is reproducibility: when a formula changes, most spreadsheets can't show what last year's ranking would have been under the old assumptions. Year-on-year comparison and audit trail both quietly fail before the scoring logic itself does.
Fair questions
What people actually ask before switching
Is the spreadsheet actually wrong?
No. A well-built spreadsheet can score and rank a small, stable register competently. It struggles at scale, at handover, and under audit — not at the math.
When should we NOT move off the spreadsheet?
If your register is small, one person owns it reliably long-term, and you're not preparing regulator evidence from it — the spreadsheet is a reasonable, low-cost choice.
Bring your own spreadsheet. We'll tell you honestly if it's still enough.
A 20-minute look at your actual register — not a demo of ours.