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SuccessionStack

Succession planning in Excel
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Most succession plans start in a spreadsheet, and for a while that is the correct decision. This page is about the specific points at which it stops being the correct decision, and it is honest about the fact that plenty of teams never reach them.

Feature comparison between SuccessionStack and Excel
CapabilityRecommended for succession
SuccessionStack
Excel
Where a spreadsheet starts to leak
Reason recorded on every score change
A required, timestamped reason attached to the change itself, not just a record that a cell was edited
YesPartial
Score history that survives a copy
Version history lives with the file; duplicate the workbook and the history does not come with it
YesPartial
Readiness windows that age
Ready Now, 1 year, 2 to 3 years, tracked per candidate per role and flagged when they go stale
YesPartial
Cross-plan cascade analysis
Model a departure up to 3 levels deep and see which other plans go thin when one person leaves
YesPartial
Calibration across raters
Compare how different managers score, so one department rating hard and another rating generously is visible
YesPartial
Weights argued once per role, not per candidate
Dimension weights set on the role profile and applied consistently to everyone scored against it
YesPartial
Confidentiality without a second private copy
Role-based access on one record, rather than a guarded file that only one person can see and maintain
YesPartial
Board-ready export from the live record
A dated report generated from current data rather than reformatted by hand before each meeting
YesPartial
Where the spreadsheet genuinely wins
Costs nothing extra
Already licensed, already installed, no line item and no renewal
Not supportedYes
No procurement, no security review
No vendor questionnaire, no DPA, no IT approval before you can start today
Not supportedYes
Any structure you want
No schema to fit. Add a column, invent a rating scale, restructure it mid-cycle
Not supportedYes
Everyone already knows how to use it
Zero onboarding for the HR team and for every manager who has to open it
Not supportedYes
Works offline and forever
The file opens in ten years with no subscription and no vendor still in business
Not supportedYes
Fine at a small role count
Under roughly ten critical roles with a single owner, the overhead of a tool is not yet earned
Not supportedYes

Comparison reflects publicly documented capabilities as of September 2026. Excel capabilities vary by how the workbook is built and who maintains it; verify against your own contract. Spot something outdated? Tell us and we'll correct it.

Rows read "partial" rather than "no" on purpose. A well-built workbook can approximate almost all of this with formulas, protected ranges, and Microsoft 365 version history. What it cannot do is enforce any of it, or keep the reasoning attached to the number once the file is copied, renamed, or inherited.

Keep the spreadsheet when

  • You are planning for fewer than about ten critical roles and one person owns the file.
  • The plan is reviewed once a year and nobody has yet had to defend a rating from last cycle.
  • No candidate appears in more than one plan, so a departure does not cascade anywhere.
  • Getting any plan written down at all is the actual win this year. A spreadsheet you maintain beats a tool you abandon.

If that is you, take the free succession planning template and skip the rest of this page. It is the same structure, already laid out.

Move off it when

  • Review meetings open by reconstructing who changed a rating and why, instead of making decisions.
  • More than one person edits the file, so no single person is accountable for whether it is still true.
  • A board, an examiner, or a passed-over candidate will ask for the reasoning behind a rating months later.
  • One person is the named successor on several plans, and nobody can say what happens to the others if they leave.

That is the argument for dedicated succession planning software, and it is a maintenance argument rather than a feature one. More on how plans decay and on the four ways a spreadsheet 9-box fails.

Questions buyers actually ask

Yes, and for a small number of roles it is the right call. A spreadsheet with one row per critical role, a named successor or two, and a readiness estimate covers the basics, costs nothing, and needs no procurement. The practical limit is not the feature list, it is maintenance: a workbook holds up while one person owns it and the role count stays small. It starts to decay once several people edit it, once ratings need to be defended months later, and once the roles interact with each other.

Four signals, and one is usually enough. Review meetings spend their first half hour reconstructing who changed what and why. More than one person edits the file, so nobody owns its accuracy. Someone asks why a candidate was rated the way they were and the answer has to come from memory. Or one person appears in several plans and no one can say which plans go thin if that person leaves. Those are the points at which the spreadsheet stops being cheap and starts being expensive.

It cannot tell you why a number changed. Microsoft 365 version history records that a cell changed and who saved the file, but not the reasoning behind the rating, which is the thing a board or an examiner actually asks for. It also cannot model a departure across roles: if one person is the named successor in four plans, a spreadsheet will not show you the other three going thin when they leave. And readiness dates in a spreadsheet do not age, so a plan quietly becomes wrong without anything on the page changing.

The difference is what gets enforced rather than what gets displayed. A required reason on every score change, weights that are argued once per role rather than per candidate, readiness windows that are tracked rather than typed, and cascade modelling across plans are all things you could approximate in a workbook and nobody sustains. What you are buying is that the discipline survives staff turnover, not a prettier grid.

Yes, and we would rather you used it than bought something you do not need yet. The succession planning template and the 9-box grid worksheet are free, ungated, and download as spreadsheets. If they hold your plan for the next two years, that is a good outcome. Most teams come back when the role count or the number of editors makes the file unmanageable, not before.

See where your bench breaks before it matters.

Bring your real org chart. We show you the succession gaps, cascade risks, and bench depth in a 30-minute walkthrough. IT security questions answered on the same call.

See SuccessionStack in action

IT review first? The FAQs answer the security questions honestly →