Every business starts somewhere. Very often, the first customer database lives in a simple Google Sheets file.

Using Google Sheets as a CRM is like “riding a bicycle” for the first time. It is cheap, easy to handle, and perfect for a start. (I still remember: when I launched my first agency in 2018, I used Google Sheets for everything.)

But over time, the business grows with more customers, more columns, more formulas, more mistakes… and suddenly you realize the bike isn’t enough anymore. It’s time for a car.

This article is about that exact moment.

I’ll show you when and why Google Sheets stops being an effective CRM for managing customer relationships, how to recognize the signals that it’s time to move on, and how Airtable (or a similar platform) can solve these problems.

You’ll also see a real case study from my practice, featuring a client who utilized seven Google Sheets for different campaigns and faced the same dilemma.

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Benefits of Google Sheets as a CRM

Before diving deeper into migration and whether it makes sense here and now, let’s be honest:

Google Sheets is a great starting point, especially when the business hasn’t built up capital yet and needs to save every possible penny.

Why businesses love it:

Free (or nearly so)

You can create a simple Gmail account, and you get access not only to Sheets but to other Google products, too.

If it’s a company account (Google Workspace), there are monthly fees; however, a basic email is sufficient to start with.

Easy to start

The best part about Google Sheets is that it feels like opening an Excel spreadsheet.

Most of us have worked in Excel, so switching to Sheets is painless.

Flexible

You can add columns, change formulas, filter, create charts, or even write scripts if you need special extra functionality.

Great for small teams

Perfect for first CRM experiments, MVPs, or prototypes.

And you don’t have to pay monthly fees just so your team can access the sheet.

🎯 Example:

If you have 30 clients and only want to track who you spoke with and when, a simple table does the job.

You have columns like “Name,” “Phone,” “Last Contact Date,” “Comment”, and everything is fine.

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Limitations of Google Sheets as a CRM

Over time, that “wonderful spreadsheet” turns into a maze.

You add columns, scripts (it’s great to have the option, but the more scripts you add, the more brittle the sheet becomes), integrations… and the system starts to wheeze.

Main problems with Google Sheet CRM:

No built-in automations

For example, if you want a change in the “Contact” column to automatically write today’s date in “Contact_last_update,” you need to write a script inside Google Sheets.

With few records and light logic, it works. But as you add more scripts to build internal “automations,” Sheets starts to break.

Access control is too basic

Google Sheets offers three roles:

• Editor (can do everything),
• Commenter (leave comments), and
• Viewer (read-only).

Convenient, but risky. At some point, someone may accidentally delete an important formula or row, breaking the sheet and slowing down the workflow.

Slow with lots of data

Over ~5,000 rows, the sheet starts to lag.

Scripts run slowly.

Some automations don’t trigger at all because the system is “out of breath.”

No relational links between tables

If you have one page for “Clients” and another for “Deals,” there’s no native way to relate them like in a real database.

You end up relying on formulas like VLOOKUP(), and the more of them you have, the more fragile everything becomes.

(For the case study below, even though it wasn’t in scope, we invested dozens of hours organizing the client’s database to make it workable.)

Lack of analytics and dashboards

Google Sheets does not have a built-in CRM dashboard.

You must build it manually or use Google Data Studio, which adds another layer of complexity.

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Signals That It’s Time to Migrate

Here are some red flags that your spreadsheet is no longer enough:

🚨 The sheet is slow to open.

You click it, wait for it to load (you even manage to reply to a Messenger message in the meantime), and after a few seconds, it finally shows your data. Scripts start throwing errors or stop working.

🚨 Too many pages and formulas.

In today’s example, you have one tab per location or campaign (7 pages… for now). Team members start “drowning” in structure and information.

🚨 More people, more problems.

When multiple people work simultaneously, the risk of accidental changes or deletions increases.

In Google Sheets CRM, anyone with Editor access can do anything, and you can’t fine-tune permissions per field or view.

🚨 Data errors.

Duplicate client names (another reason you need a cleaning/validation automation), missing emails, and outdated statuses.

🚨 You want automations and integrations.

You want a change in “Contact” to automatically fill today’s date in “Contact_last_update.”

Google Sheets can do it, but it’s hard and often brittle.

Here’s the function we had to create with a script (don’t be scared):

// Writes the date into "Контакт_last_update" when "Контакт" changes.
// Works in any sheet that has both headers in row 1.
const CONTACT_HEADER = "Контакт";
const LAST_UPDATE_HEADER = "Контакт_last_update";
const HEADER_ROW = 1;
const DATE_FORMAT = "dd.MM.yyyy"; // or "dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm"

function _norm(s){ return String(s||"").replace(/\u00A0/g," ").trim(); }

function _findCols(sheet){
  const lastCol = sheet.getLastColumn();
  if (!lastCol) return {contactCol:-1,lastUpdateCol:-1};
  const headers = sheet.getRange(HEADER_ROW,1,1,lastCol).getValues()[0].map(_norm);
  return {
    contactCol:    headers.findIndex(h=>h===CONTACT_HEADER)+1 || -1,
    lastUpdateCol: headers.findIndex(h=>h===LAST_UPDATE_HEADER)+1 || -1,
  };
}

function onEdit(e){
  try {
    if (!e || !e.range) return;
    const sheet = e.range.getSheet();

    const { contactCol, lastUpdateCol } = _findCols(sheet);
    if (contactCol === -1 || lastUpdateCol === -1) return;      // required columns not found
    if (e.range.getRow() <= HEADER_ROW) return;                  // skip header row
    if (e.range.getColumn() > contactCol || e.range.getLastColumn() < contactCol) return; // not editing "Contact"

    const rowStart = Math.max(e.range.getRow(), HEADER_ROW+1);
    const rowEnd   = e.range.getLastRow();

    // new "Contact" values
    const newVals = sheet.getRange(rowStart, contactCol, rowEnd-rowStart+1, 1)
                         .getValues().map(v => _norm(v[0]));

    // for single-cell edits we can read oldValue
    const singleCell = (rowStart===rowEnd &&
                        e.range.getColumn()===contactCol &&
                        e.range.getLastColumn()===contactCol);
    const oldVal = singleCell ? _norm(e.oldValue) : null;

    const out = [];
    for (let i=0; i<newVals.length; i++){
      const cur = newVals[i];

      // if single-cell and value hasn't changed → keep existing date
      if (singleCell && cur === oldVal) {
        out.push([ sheet.getRange(rowStart+i, lastUpdateCol).getValue() ]);
        continue;
      }

      // if empty → clear date; else → write today (Europe/Sofia)
      out.push([ cur ? Utilities.formatDate(new Date(), "Europe/Sofia", DATE_FORMAT) : "" ]);
    }

    sheet.getRange(rowStart, lastUpdateCol, out.length, 1).setValues(out);
  } catch (err) {
    Logger.log("onEdit error: " + err);
  }
}

And that’s just one of the internal automations we had to write a script.

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Why Airtable CRM (or a similar system)

For those of you who didn’t get scared and made it this far…breathe. There’s light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s not an oncoming train.

To fix all these problems, Airtable CRM comes to the rescue.

It’s the golden middle space between Google Sheets and a full-blown CRM like ClickUp.

Airtable looks like a spreadsheet, but under the hood, it’s a real database.

You can create relations between tables (e.g., Clients ↔ Deals), build automations, filtered views, and control who sees what—and what they can do.

Key advantages:

• Database structure with spreadsheet comfort.
• Linked records between objects—you can have tables for clients, deals, properties, etc., that “talk” to each other.
• Ready-made views and filters—see data in ways that make sense to you (grid, calendar, Kanban, gallery).
• Built-in automations and integrations—no external scripts required.
• Easy migration from Google Sheets—you can even set up a very simple n8n.io automation to move data from Sheets into Airtable.

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Practical Example (A Real Case from Marinext AI)

We’ve skimmed through what Google Sheets and Airtable are. As promised, here’s a recent case.

We collaborated with a real estate agency that used Google Sheets as its CRM.

They had seven pages – one for each of the targeted locations in Sofia.

When we started, the sheets were chaotic; brokers were entering data inconsistently (if at all), and the business owner had no clear picture of what was happening with clients.

We spent dozens of hours structuring the sheets properly.

However, some changes required automations / internal functions, no matter what you call them.

Without them, we simply couldn’t move forward.

The Challenges We Faced

The problem arose when there were too many automations, and we could no longer rely on Google Sheets’ standard capabilities.

We had to write several custom scripts to keep control over the data and avoid human errors.

☑️ First script (onChangeTrigger and checkEmailsAcrossAllSheets) checked for duplicate emails across all seven tabs in the CRM.

The idea was simple: if the same email appeared in more than one tab, the script marked “yes” in a “Exists” column; if it was unique, “no.”

This allows real estate agents to quickly check whether a contact already exists without having to search through hundreds of rows and pages.

However, with larger sheets, this began to strain the system, and every change in any sheet triggered checks across all tabs simultaneously.

☑️ Second script (onEdit) had a different purpose: to track when a contact was last changed.

On any change in the “Contact” column, it automatically wrote the current date into “Contact_last_update.”

This gave the team immediate visibility on how fresh each record was, and it turned out to be critical for one of our n8n automations.

Both scripts were necessary because Google Sheets lacks built-in tools for these checks and logic.

One of them could have been replaced with a cell formula, but we concluded it wouldn’t be a sustainable long-term solution.

In the end, the very automations meant to help us started blocking the system, a clear sign it was time to move to a more mature, stable platform like Airtable.

What We Did

• Structure assessment—how many tables, how many columns, how many automations.
• Migration planning—designing the initial Airtable base.
• Data import—Airtable supports direct import from Google Sheets.
• Automations setup, e.g.:
  • On status change → automatically create a task for the broker.
  • On new contact → send an email and set “last contact date.”
• Dashboard creation—the owner now sees, in real time, how many new leads there are, who’s handling them, and what the outcomes are.

A heavy part of this project was that we had already built several n8n automations working with the client’s Google Sheets.

During implementation, we hit multiple limits and errors. Luckily, around that time, the owner mentioned a desire to migrate soon anyway. Our team faced a choice:

1. Continue the project (already two months in) to meet the original timeline; later, when the client decides to migrate, start a new project, paid again, and rebuild everything for the new system. Or
2. Swallow the time already invested (and ask the client for a deadline extension), and migrate at our expense now—saving them thousands in costs and lost time if this had to happen 6–12 months later.

I’ll let you guess which approach we chose…

📈 Result

• No more brittle scripts.
• Automations are centralized in Airtable.
• A visual dashboard connected to the base, allowing the owner to track everything in real-time.
• Clean, organized data with controlled access.
• The team works faster, with minimal retraining.

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Conclusion

Google Sheets is a wonderful friend at the beginning – simple, reliable, and easy.

But as the business grows, that friend can start holding you back.

Migrating to Airtable (or a similar system) isn’t just a tool swap; it’s a change in how you manage your business.

You stop thinking about scripts, limits, and errors—and start focusing on clients, processes, and results.

Airtable provides the flexibility to build internal automations, dashboards, and systems that evolve with you.