Advice on how to streamline/improve this spreadsheet?

[excelrook28]

Hi all,

For context, we use a spreadsheet to track the progress of specific work we do for clients. Each client has an assigned prepared and reviewer, and there are a bunch of steps in the process that we complete. This involves manually adding dates on the date that the specific task has been completed. We use this spreadsheet to track the status of specific client work and see whether we're on track- whether something is being held up and what needs attention etc. Unfortunately, when you put the onus on individuals to manually add dates, we tend to forget, and it causes confusion for the team as we have to scurry around a bit to bring things up to speed.

Ultimately, this format works somewhat fine, but as a team we all feel that there must be a much better way to format this on Excel. As it stands, we only really utilise conditional formatting in the fields that indicate the preparer and reviewer for the client. The fields that indicate the tasks are just manually input with dates (except for the notes column, which is just an optional field to provide any additional details.)

As someone with only a basic level of understanding with regards to excel, I'd love to use this as a chance to improve my basic skills and use excel to add value to our processes. Please let me know if you have any tips or ideas to improve what we currently have. I've included a screenshot below which basically outlines how we format it.

 

[mumps]

Assuming that the date a specific task has been completed can be entered on any day and time, the only thing that I can think of is to use conditional formatting of all the cells that will contain a date to turn red if they are blank and to turn green if they are not blank. The red colour would be a visual clue that a date has not yet been entered.