Every advising office has a spreadsheet that exactly one person understands. Then that person takes a new job, and the cryptic abbreviations and three years of student history go with them.
Here's my take: spreadsheets are good at recording what already happened. They're bad at telling you which student is truly struggling. If you want to catch students early, you need student success tracking software that turns your data into something your team can act on.
Spreadsheets aren't the villain. They got you this far, and they're flexible and familiar. But they weren't built for the complexity of student success work.
They only tell you what someone typed in. Nobody gets a nudge when a student's status changes. Someone has to open the file, notice, and care that day.
This extensive history and data often lives with one person, too. A student's story gets split between an advisor's inbox, a personal drive, and a note in cell F42. When caseloads shift or an advisor leaves, the vital context doesn't transfer.
Then there's version control. Two advisors, two copies, one student. Which one is right?
None of this is your team's fault. It's what happens when a tool built for tables gets asked to run an early-warning system.
For a health professions program, this is what I'd want in one place:
That last one is underrated. A student nobody has talked to in months is a data point too.
Be wary of vanity metrics. A dashboard with 40 numbers and zero decisions is just a prettier spreadsheet. For every metric, ask: if this number changes, who does what?
Plenty of tools call themselves student success platforms. Here's the standard I'd hold one to:
One shared student record: Every note, meeting, and status update lives in one place the whole advising team can see. When someone leaves, the history remains accessible to all. For a lot of offices, that alone justifies the switch.
Early signals, not just reports: The goal is to catch problems before they become crises. Good software helps you identify at-risk students while there's still time to step in, not after a student is already failing or withdrawing.
A real LOA process: Leave of absence tracking is one of the biggest operational gaps in student affairs, and it's usually held together with email threads and good intentions. A documented, consistent process beats ad hoc tracking every time, especially when accreditors ask how you manage it.
Communication that isn't scattered: When announcements live in the LMS and outreach lives in someone's inbox, nobody sees the whole picture. You want the full communication history with each student visible across your team.
That's what we built SAMS, our Student Advising and Management System, to do. It supports the student journey from enrollment through graduation, and we organize it around five steps: Gather, Connect, Monitor, Advise, and Succeed. The idea is simple: advisors should spend their time advising, not doing data entry.
Try this before you talk to anyone. Pick five students at random and time how long it takes to pull each one's full history: notes, communications, and any leave status. If it takes more than a couple of minutes, or the answer changes depending on who you ask, you've got your business case.
Want to see what a shared student record looks like in practice? Request a demo of our student advising and management systems (SAMS) tool. And bring your messiest spreadsheet; we like a challenge!