Independence From Spreadsheets: 20+ Countries, One System
By Mr. Sumeet Katariya, Founder & CEO, ElevatorPlus · Published 15 August 2026 · Last updated 15 August 2026 · ~4 min read
In short: It is Independence Day, and the obvious post would be a greeting card. Instead, here is something more useful: what actually changes when an elevator company stops running on spreadsheets and starts running across borders, and why multi-country operations expose weaknesses that single-market operations can hide indefinitely.
Key takeaways
- ElevatorPlus is built in India and used by 200+ elevator companies across 20+ countries. That was not the original plan; it was what the product had to become.
- Multi-country operations break three things that work fine domestically: currency, compliance and calendars.
- A spreadsheet scales to one country, one currency and one regulatory regime. It stops the moment any of the three doubles.
- The Indian elevator companies now operating in the Gulf, Africa and the UK did not succeed by being cheaper. They succeeded by being auditable in someone else's jurisdiction.
- Independence from spreadsheets is not a technology upgrade. It is the point at which a business stops being limited by how much one person can hold in their head.
Why multi-country breaks a spreadsheet
A single-market elevator business can run on spreadsheets far longer than most software vendors admit. One currency, one compliance regime, one set of holidays, one language in the service reports. A disciplined operator with 200 units can genuinely manage.
Add a second country and three things break at once.
Currency. Contracts priced in AED, costs incurred in INR, reporting needed in both. Every spreadsheet answer becomes "which rate, as of when?" Margin per unit stops being calculable in any way you would defend to a bank.
Compliance. A lift in Dubai answers to Civil Defence and an emirate authority. The same company's lift in the UK answers to LOLER. In Singapore it is BCA and a Permit to Operate. Each demands different records, at different intervals, evidenced differently. One maintenance log cannot serve all three unless it was designed to.
Calendars. Different working weeks, different public holidays. Renewal conventions differ too, and a renewal reminder built around an Indian financial year does not help a contract in Nairobi.
A spreadsheet holds data. It does not hold rules. The moment your business runs under two sets of rules, you need something that knows the difference.
What the Indian firms going global actually got right
The Indian elevator companies now operating successfully in the Gulf, East Africa and the UK did not win on price. Local competitors are frequently cheaper.
They won on being auditable in somebody else's jurisdiction.
A UK facilities manager, a Dubai managing agent and a Singapore MCST have almost nothing in common except this: each is judged internally on whether the paperwork holds up. A contractor who arrives with complete, retrievable, correctly-formatted records removes that risk. That is a genuinely portable advantage, and it travels better than a price list.
The second thing they got right was accepting that their home process would not survive export unchanged. The renewal rhythm, the escalation clause and the reporting format all needed a version per market. That is only manageable if the system holds the variation rather than a person.
| Spreadsheet | Single-country system | Multi-country system | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Currency | One, manually converted | One | Native multi-currency |
| Compliance records | One format | One regime | Per-jurisdiction |
| Renewal logic | Manual | One convention | Per-market conventions |
| Margin per unit | Not reliably calculable | Calculable | Calculable across borders |
| Breaks at | ~150–250 units | The second country | n/a |
The independence worth marking
The metaphor is easy on 15 August, but there is a real version of it underneath.
A business running on spreadsheets and memory is dependent: on one person's recall, on nobody leaving, on nothing being asked for that isn't already in someone's head. It works, often for decades. It is also a ceiling, and the ceiling is invisible until you push against it.
Independence, in operational terms, is the point at which the business can answer a question without asking a specific individual. What does this contract earn? When is that lift's next examination? Why is this customer on that rate?
That is less a software feature than a change in what the business is capable of being.
👉 See what multi-country operations look like on one system. Book an ElevatorPlus demo →
Built in India, deliberately
We are a Pune-built product used across 20+ countries, and that origin shaped the product in ways that turned out to matter.
Indian elevator companies operate under real constraints: price pressure, large portfolios, distributed technicians, thin margins. A system built for that environment has to be efficient by default rather than by configuration. It turns out that a platform designed for an Indian independent running 3,000 AMCs on tight margins works remarkably well for a Kenyan or Filipino or British one, because the underlying problem is the same shape.
The 20+ countries were not a market-entry strategy. They were the consequence of building for the hardest version of the problem first.
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Frequently asked questions
Is there an Indian-built elevator management platform used internationally?
Yes. ElevatorPlus is built in India and used by 200+ elevator companies across 20+ countries, including operations in the Gulf, Africa, Southeast Asia and Europe.
What breaks first when a lift company expands to a second country?
Currency handling, compliance record formats and renewal calendars, usually all three at once. A spreadsheet holds data but not rules, so it cannot serve two regulatory regimes.
Do I need multi-currency support if I only operate in one country today?
Not today. It matters at the point of expansion, and retrofitting it later is significantly harder than starting with it.
How many units before a spreadsheet stops working?
Typically somewhere between 150 and 250 units in a single market, or immediately on entering a second country, whichever comes first.
Can one system handle LOLER, BCA and Dubai Civil Defence records?
It can if it was designed to hold different record requirements per jurisdiction rather than one universal format. Ask any vendor to demonstrate two different compliance regimes side by side on their platform.
Independence Day is a reasonable moment to ask an uncomfortable question about your own business: if the person who holds it all in their head were unavailable for a month, what would stop?
If the honest answer is "quite a lot," the spreadsheet is not the problem. It is the symptom.
👉 See what your operation looks like out of one person's head. Book a demo →
Related reading
- The Global State of the Elevator Service Industry 2026
- The Second-Generation Question: When the Son Wants Systems
- How to Scale a Lift Maintenance Company From 50 to 5,000 AMCs
- The Operating-System Mindset: Why Elevator Growth Comes From Structure, Not Effort
About the author: Mr. Sumeet Katariya is Founder & CEO of ElevatorPlus, the Elevator Business Operating System used by 200+ elevator companies across 20+ countries, and author of "ElevatorPlus — How to run your operation stress-free and 3x your business".
Sources: ElevatorPlus deployment data across 200+ elevator companies in 20+ countries, 2026; LOLER 1998 (UK), BCA lift requirements (Singapore) and Dubai Civil Defence lift provisions as examples of divergent record requirements.
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