Every IT team starts the same way.
Someone creates a spreadsheet. They add columns: hostname, certificate issuer, expiration date, owner, notes. They share it with the team. For a while, it works.
Then it doesn't.
Why Spreadsheets Fail for Certificate Tracking
Spreadsheets are great at many things. Tracking the lifecycle of dozens (or hundreds) of SSL certificates, domains, and IT assets is not one of them.
Here's why:
1. Nobody Updates Them
The spreadsheet only works if someone manually checks each certificate, looks up the expiration date, and types it in. For 10 certificates, that's tedious but doable. For 50? For 200? Someone will forget. Someone will procrastinate. The spreadsheet goes stale.
And stale data is worse than no data — it gives you false confidence.
2. No Alerts
A spreadsheet doesn't tap you on the shoulder 30 days before a cert expires. It doesn't send your team a Slack message at 14 days. It doesn't text you at 3 days. It just sits there, waiting for someone to open it and scroll through dates.
By the time you notice, the cert might already be expired.
3. Auto-Discovery Doesn't Exist
When your infrastructure changes — new subdomains, new services, new load balancers — spreadsheets don't automatically discover them. You have to know about every certificate to track it. The dangerous ones are the ones you don't know about.
4. No Ownership Model
Who's responsible for renewing the wildcard cert? Is it the DevOps engineer who set it up, the IT manager who manages the domain, or the security team? In a spreadsheet, "ownership" is a column that may or may not be filled in.
5. It Doesn't Scale With Your Team
When multiple people edit the same spreadsheet, versions diverge. Comments get lost. Someone overwrites someone else's update. There's no audit trail, no role-based access, and no way to assign items to specific team members.
6. Audit and Compliance Gaps
When an auditor or examiner asks "show me how you track IT asset expirations," handing them a Google Sheet with half the rows outdated isn't a great look. Compliance frameworks expect documented processes with evidence of monitoring — not a file that was last edited three months ago.
What a Dedicated Tool Actually Gives You
A purpose-built expiration tracking tool solves every one of these problems:
| Capability | Spreadsheet | Dedicated Tool | |-----------|-------------|----------------| | Auto-discovery | ❌ Manual | ✅ Enter hostname, get cert details | | Alerts | ❌ None | ✅ Email, Slack, Teams, SMS | | Ownership | ❌ Unenforceable | ✅ Assigned per item | | Audit trail | ❌ None | ✅ Change history | | Scaling | ❌ Gets messy | ✅ Handles thousands | | Compliance reporting | ❌ Embarrassing | ✅ PDF reports ready | | Up-to-date data | ❌ Probably not | ✅ Auto-checked on schedule |
The Real Cost of a Spreadsheet
The spreadsheet itself is free. The outage it causes isn't.
Consider: the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute for mid-size organizations. A single expired certificate that causes a 2-hour outage costs over $670,000.
A dedicated monitoring tool costs $50-300 per month. The math isn't close.
When to Switch
If any of these describe your team, it's time to move beyond spreadsheets:
- You've had a certificate expire unexpectedly in the past 12 months
- You track more than 20 certificates or domains
- Multiple people are responsible for different expirations
- You've been asked for a compliance report on IT asset management
- You're losing sleep wondering if something is about to expire
Try Lapse.watch
Lapse.watch was built specifically for IT teams who've outgrown spreadsheets but don't need (or want) a full enterprise monitoring suite.
Auto-discovery. Multi-channel alerts. Team collaboration. Compliance reports. One dashboard.
Start your free 14-day trial → No credit card required.