From Microsoft Forms and Excel to one scouting system

A lot of clubs collect scouting reports through an online form, export the answers to Excel, clean them by hand and feed a Power BI dashboard. It works, after a fashion. This guide is about what that set-up costs your department every week, and what changes when reports, players and coverage all live in one place.

The form, the clean, the dashboard

If you work in a recruitment department, there is a good chance your scouting runs on three tools that were never designed to talk to each other about football.

1. The formScouts fill in a Microsoft Forms or Google Forms report after the game. Free text for names, a few rating questions, a comments box.
2. The cleanEvery week someone exports the responses to Excel and spends hours fixing spellings, removing duplicates and lining columns back up.
3. The dashboardA Power BI report reads the cleaned spreadsheet. It shows what was true at the last refresh, and nothing since.

None of these are bad tools. A form takes ten minutes to build, Excel can do almost anything, and Power BI makes excellent dashboards. The trouble is the gaps between them, and the fact that none of them knows what a fixture, a player or a scout’s coverage is. The department ends up doing that joining-up by hand.

Where it goes wrong

The problems show up in three places: at the pitch, in the office and when it is time to make a decision.

At the pitch

• No draft to come back to. A report is rarely written in one sitting. You form a view in the first half and the second half changes it. In the way most club forms are set up there is nothing to save halfway, so the report is either rushed in the car park or pieced together later from memory.
• Corrections become duplicates. Once a report is submitted it is usually out of the scout’s hands. Wrong age group? Most scouts simply submit again, and now there are two reports on the same player from the same game.
• Names typed freehand. Nothing is prefilled, so one club arrives as “Riverside Juniors”, “Riverside Jnrs” and “Riverside FC U12”. Player names are worse. The form has no idea that two spellings at the same club are one player, so reports never join up into a single player record.

In the office

• The weekly clean. Someone, usually the most organised person in the department, exports the responses and spends hours tidying them. When they are on holiday it does not happen. One person becomes the bottleneck for everyone’s information.
• Coverage nobody can see. A sheet of form responses struggles to answer simple questions. Which priority clubs have we not watched this month? Who saw this player, and when? How many times has he been watched? So two scouts turn up at the same game while another club goes unwatched for weeks.
• Scales that drift. One scout’s 3 is another’s 4. Then someone changes the form mid-season to add a question or adjust a scale, the columns move, the formulas break and the dashboard needs fixing.
• Copies everywhere. Exports get saved, renamed and emailed around. Each copy is a spreadsheet of young players’ names, dates of birth and clubs sitting on a laptop or in an inbox. That is a data-protection risk most clubs would rather not carry.

At decision time

• The dashboard is not live. Power BI shows what the spreadsheet held at its last refresh. A report filed on Saturday night is not in Monday’s meeting unless someone has cleaned the export and refreshed it first.
• Every viewer costs extra. In most set-ups, sharing a Power BI dashboard means each person viewing it needs a licence. So scouts often never see their own numbers.
• It needs a specialist. The dashboard was built by someone who knows Power BI. When the form changes, or that person moves on, it waits.
• Slow decisions, lost knowledge. A “watch again this weekend” buried in a comments box is easy to miss by the time anyone reads it. Scouts get little feedback on their own work. And when a scout leaves, much of what they knew leaves with them.

What happens now vs in Scout52

Here is the same week of scouting, side by side.

Editing submitted reports is on the Scout and Scout Pro plans. On the Free plan, submitted grassroots reports cannot be edited.

What changes for each role

How to move across

There is no big-bang switchover. Most departments run it like this:

1. Start free. Create a free account and file a grassroots report or two. The Free plan includes grassroots reports, the grassroots overview, player actions, the 52 Week Calendar and My Notes, with no card needed.
2. Try the full toolset. Scout (£9.99 a month) adds professional reports, editing your reports, reports summary and analysis, priority positions and priority clubs, Player Management and the depth chart. Scout Pro (£19.99 a month) adds the Scout52 player database, S52 scores and archetypes, and matches and fixtures. Both have a 7-day free trial with no card needed.
3. Set up your lists. Add your own leagues and dropdown lists, plus your priority clubs and positions, so every report lands against what your department actually tracks.
4. Bring the department over. For several scouts on one system, Scout52 sets up clubs and academies with shared reports and player management, department dashboards, your own branded app and onboarding. Email info@scout52.com to talk it through.

One honest point: an old spreadsheet will not turn itself into clean player records. Most departments pick a start date, keep the old file as an archive to refer back to, and file everything new in Scout52. The reports that matter most are the current ones, and they are in the right place from day one.

If you are tidying up how reports are written at the same time, our guide to writing a football scouting report is a good place to agree a standard.

Weighing up one part of the set-up? See Scout52 vs a scouting spreadsheet and Scout52 vs Microsoft Forms and Power BI.