Compare / Spreadsheets and email
Spreadsheets and email, or a CPD platform?
For a small scheme with light checking, a spreadsheet can be enough. As a scheme grows, it gets expensive in ways that never show on an invoice: weeks of staff time at renewal, certificates sitting in inboxes, audits that mean chasing paperwork, and members who lose their own records. A CPD platform moves the recording to members, shows you progress as it happens, and turns an audit into days of review instead of weeks of admin.
Stay with a spreadsheet if…
- your scheme is small
- you don't audit
- members rarely ask for their records
Look at a platform if…
- renewal takes more than a week of staff time
- you audit, or you've been asked to
- members ask you for copies of their own records
- your board wants uptake and completion figures
- the person who runs the spreadsheet is leaving
What spreadsheets do well
Free, familiar and flexible
- They're free, and everyone already knows how to use Excel.
- They bend to any scheme, however unusual.
- There's no procurement, no contract and no training.
- For a few dozen members who rarely need checking, they're often all you need.
Side by side
Where spreadsheets start to cost you
| Spreadsheet and email | RiverCPD | |
|---|---|---|
| Getting records in | Members email certificates; staff re-type them | Members photo the certificate on their phone; the record arrives complete, with the evidence attached |
| Seeing who's on track | Someone compiles a report, which is out of date by the time it's read | Every member's progress against your targets, live |
| Chasing | One email at a time | Reminders and announcements to members' phones and inboxes |
| Auditing | Request, collect, open attachments, track decisions in another sheet | Random sample, submission, entry-by-entry review, every decision recorded |
| Quality of reflection | Whatever members type | A coach that asks the right questions, and a check against your standard. It never writes reflections for them. |
| Data protection | Certificates and personal data in inboxes and shared drives; copies emailed around | Your own database, hosted in the UK, with access by role |
| Members' own record | Their copy, if they kept one | Always there, and exportable at any time |
| If the person who runs it leaves | The knowledge often leaves with them | The scheme, the history and the rules stay in the system |
The real cost
Working out what your spreadsheet really costs
Add up the staff time that goes on CPD admin in a typical year: (hours of renewal admin + hours of audit admin + hours answering members' CPD queries) × your hourly staff cost.
An illustrative example (put in your own figures): an association of 2,000 members spends 150 hours at renewal chasing and logging certificates, audits 5% of members (100 people) at 1.5 hours of admin each (150 hours), and answers CPD queries for another 50 hours. That's 350 hours. At £25 an hour including on-costs, it's about £8,750 a year of staff time, before the risk of an unmanaged data breach or a renewal decision nobody can evidence.RiverCPD for 2,000 members costs up to £12,000 + VAT a year: £6 for each member with an account. Accounts are created when members first sign in, so if 60% of them do, it's £7,200. Year one is free. You get the staff time back, every member gets a CPD app they'd pay £18 a year for on their own, and you get a scheme members actually use and an audit you can defend.
Moving off spreadsheets
Bring your history with you
Send us your existing records and we'll import them at no charge, so members open the app to find their history already there. Members sign in with the login they already use for your association. We set your scheme up from your CPD policy.
Is a CPD spreadsheet GDPR compliant? It can be. The risk is in how it's handled. Certificates carry personal data, and spreadsheets tend to be emailed, copied and saved to personal drives. Whatever you use, know where every copy is and who can open it.Can members keep using their own spreadsheets? They can keep personal copies. With RiverCPD, the record your association relies on is the one in the platform, and members can export it whenever they like.See your own scheme running in RiverCPD.
Book thirty minutes with the people who built it. Send us your CPD policy first and we'll load it.