Excel is not the enemy. It is often the first honest model of how a business works: columns that match the work, formulas that encode a rule, a sheet that one person can still hold in their head.
The trouble starts when the company is no longer that small. Two people edit at once. A version is emailed. A column means something different on Fridays. The person who built the file is on leave, and nobody is sure which number is the number.
The grid still opens. The process no longer lives there safely.
What 'outgrown' actually looks like
It is not a row count. A business has outgrown a spreadsheet when the spreadsheet is doing the job of a system: status, ownership, history, permissions, and the next action. Those are not spreadsheet problems. They are operational ones.
You see it in the workarounds. Colour codes that only one team understands. A second file that 'is the real one'. A weekly ritual of copying figures into another place so leadership can see them.
What should replace it
Not 'a database' in the abstract, and not another general-purpose tool that will be configured until it resembles the spreadsheet. The replacement should be the process, made durable: who can change what, what happens next, and a single record of what is true.
The spreadsheet can remain for thinking. It should not remain as the operating system of the company.
How to tell from the work, not the file size
Ask who can change a number, and whether anyone else will know they did. Ask where status lives when the file is closed. Ask what happens when two teams need the same row on the same afternoon. If those answers are 'message them' or 'use the other copy', the company is already running a system. It is just a fragile one.
Alphtec's work, in those cases, is not to 'move you off Excel'. It is to take the process the spreadsheet was trying to hold, and make it a system the organisation can run.
That usually starts with one file: the one people still open on Monday morning. What does it hold that the official tools do not? Status, ownership, a rule someone typed into a formula. Those are the requirements. The replacement is successful when that file can go back to thinking — and the company can still see what is true.