Why 2026 Is the Year Mid-Market Teams Abandon Spreadsheet Goal-Tracking
For a long time the spreadsheet was the default home for company goals, and at the smaller end it still makes sense. However, something has shifted for mid-market organisations in particular, and 2026 looks like the year a lot of them finally move their objectives and key results out of Excel for good. The reasons are partly about how these companies now work, and partly about a growing awareness of what spreadsheets quietly cost.
The mid-market is where spreadsheets break first
Small teams can run their goals from a single tab almost indefinitely. Large enterprises, on the other hand, tend to have already bought dedicated systems. It is the mid-market, the companies somewhere between fifty and a few hundred people, that sits in the uncomfortable middle, and that is exactly where a shared spreadsheet starts to fail.
At that size you have several teams that need to stay aligned, a goal hierarchy that should connect company objectives to individual key results, and far too many people editing the same file for any version to stay authoritative for long. The spreadsheet does not collapse dramatically. It just stops being trusted, and once people stop trusting the numbers, they stop acting on them.
Distributed work removed the spreadsheet’s safety net
Part of what kept spreadsheet tracking alive was proximity. When everyone sat together, the gaps in the file were patched in conversation, and a quick word across the desk kept the numbers roughly honest.
That safety net is mostly gone. With teams now spread across locations and time zones, the informal correction that used to happen in the room does not happen at all, and the spreadsheet has to carry weight it was never designed for. A tracker that depended on everyone being in the same place was always going to struggle once the team stopped being in the same place.
The error problem is getting harder to ignore
There is also a growing willingness to take spreadsheet risk seriously. The European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group maintains a long catalogue of costly real-world spreadsheet failures, and the underlying research has consistently found that a significant proportion of business spreadsheets contain errors.
The public examples are sobering. Public Health England lost almost 16,000 COVID-19 case records in 2020 because a spreadsheet hit a row limit and silently discarded the rest. Years earlier, an influential economics paper by Reinhart and Rogoff was found to contain an Excel error that affected its headline conclusions. If institutions with real resources can be undone by the mechanics of a spreadsheet, mid-market leaders are right to ask whether their strategic goals should really live in the same kind of file.
What teams are moving towards
The shift is not really about chasing the newest software. It is about wanting four fairly basic things that a flat spreadsheet cannot deliver all at once: a single source of truth everyone reads the same way, an explicit link from company objectives down to individual key results, check-ins light enough that people actually complete them, and a history that shows how a goal moved over time rather than only where it landed.
Purpose-built platforms now cover this ground, and tools such as OKRnest are part of a wider category designed specifically to keep alignment visible and check-ins frictionless, which is precisely where spreadsheets fall down at scale. The framework itself is not new, and the OKR model has been widely understood for years. What has changed is that mid-market teams increasingly expect the tooling around that model to match how they actually operate.
The takeaway
Calling 2026 the year the spreadsheet dies would be overstating it, and frankly that kind of claim rarely holds up. The more honest version is that for mid-market companies, the conditions that made spreadsheet goal-tracking workable have quietly fallen away, while the awareness of its risks has risen. When those two lines cross, moving on stops being a nice-to-have and starts being the obvious choice. For a lot of teams, that crossing point is arriving now.