Telden vs spreadsheets for GPSR compliance.
Almost every seller starts with a spreadsheet. It works until it doesn't. This is an honest look at what spreadsheets do well, where they break down under GPSR obligations, and when a dedicated system starts to pay off.
Short answer: if you have under 50 SKUs and your supplier documentation is already organized, a spreadsheet may be enough for now. Beyond that, the operational cost of maintaining spreadsheet compliance typically exceeds the cost of the right tool.
Where spreadsheets work
Spreadsheets are genuinely good for some things.
We're not going to pretend that spreadsheets are worthless. For the right scope, they work well. Here's where they earn their keep.
Where spreadsheets break
The five failure modes of spreadsheet compliance.
These aren't edge cases. They're predictable failure patterns that emerge at specific growth thresholds for almost every seller using spreadsheets for product safety work.
The assertion problem
A spreadsheet cell that says "Y" for CE certification is an assertion, not evidence. When a market surveillance authority asks for the Declaration of Conformity, they want the document, not a green cell. The spreadsheet represents the state you believe things are in. It is not the evidence itself. As catalogs grow, the gap between spreadsheet assertion and document reality widens.
The document-to-product mapping drift
Documents get updated. File names change. New versions get saved in different folders. Suppliers send revised certificates without flagging what changed. Within 6–12 months of active catalog management, the mapping between your spreadsheet and your actual document corpus starts to drift. By the time you need to produce a specific document quickly, finding the right current version takes longer than the original document retrieval.
No review workflow or approval gates
A spreadsheet has no concept of "this product has been reviewed and approved by a qualified person." Any cell can be changed by anyone at any time with no audit trail. When an authority asks "who approved this product as compliant, and when?" The honest answer from a spreadsheet is often: "someone updated a cell at some point, and we're not entirely sure who."
Multi-channel publishing divergence
When the same product is sold through your own shop, Amazon, eBay, and a trade portal, each channel demands safety data in a different format. Without a single source of truth, teams maintain separate copies. These copies diverge. An update to a responsible person address gets applied to the shop but not to the marketplace feed. Audit exposure accumulates silently.
The authority response problem
Under GPSR, you may be required to provide technical documentation to a market surveillance authority within a defined timeframe. If that request covers 20 SKUs selected at random from your catalog, assembling the response from a spreadsheet system typically takes days. The documents may be in multiple locations. Some versions may be in doubt. The assembly is manual and error-prone under pressure.
Criteria comparison
Head-to-head across the criteria that matter.
| Criterion | Spreadsheet | Telden |
|---|---|---|
| Setup time | Minutes, no onboarding needed | Under 10 min with CSV import |
| Cost at 50 SKUs | Free | €49/month |
| Document storage | External drive or cloud folder (unlinked) | Fingerprinted, stored securely, linked to SKUs |
| Evidence extraction | Manual: you read PDFs and type into cells | AI extracts warnings, CE data, and compliance fields from documents |
| Review workflow | None: any cell can be changed by anyone at any time | Ready / Review / Blocked states with approval gates |
| Audit trail | Version history if you're lucky; often none | Full revision history with timestamps and attribution |
| Gap and conflict detection | Manual: only what you remember to check | Automatic: missing fields flagged, extraction conflicts detected for review |
| Multi-channel publishing | Copy-paste per channel, divergence inevitable | Single approved dossier → PDF, CSV, JSON, safety pages |
| Team collaboration | Shared file, no access controls, merge conflicts | Role-based access, multi-seat, traceable changes |
| Scalability beyond 200 SKUs | Breaks: maintenance becomes full-time work | Designed for catalogs from 50 to unlimited SKUs |
| Authority response readiness | Hours to days of manual assembly | Dossier export on demand, evidence chain intact |
When you should stick with a spreadsheet
You have fewer than 50 stable SKUs and your supplier documentation is already well-organized and linked. The operational overhead of a dedicated tool outweighs the benefit.
Your catalog is not growingand you don't sell through multiple channels. Spreadsheet maintenance is proportional to catalog size and channel complexity.
You haven't been asked for documentation yet.If you're just starting to think about GPSR and need to inventory what you have, start with a spreadsheet. Migrate when the pain of the spreadsheet starts costing more than the tool.
Your budget doesn't allow it.Telden starts at €49/month. If that's not viable right now, use a spreadsheet carefully and plan the migration for when it is.
When to switch
The signals that tell you the spreadsheet has hit its limit.
A supplier sends you an updated certificate and you're not sure which products it covers or whether it replaces an existing document.
You sell the same product on multiple channels and have started maintaining separate copies of safety data.
More than one person touches compliance data and you've had a version conflict or overwrite.
A marketplace has asked you to prove compliance for a specific SKU and the assembly took more than an hour.
You've added a new team member and they can't navigate your compliance records without help from the person who built them.
You're not sure whether the compliance data for your 200th SKU is current.
Any one of these is a signal. Three or more means the spreadsheet is already costing you more operational time than a dedicated system would cost to run.
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