Job tracking spreadsheet: when it stops working

A spreadsheet is the best possible place to start tracking jobs. It opens in a second, the columns are named your way and nobody has to approve anything. That is why small firms run on one for years, and why it works.

Then comes the day a customer rings about a date, you open the file and you are not sure you are looking at the version that counts. This article is about spotting that day in advance, because it never announces itself. It arrives slowly, and the firm gets used to working around it.

Six signs the spreadsheet has been outgrown

It is not about the number of rows. Excel will hold more jobs than a small firm books in a year. It breaks somewhere else:

• More than one person edits it. The moment two people open the file and one works in a copy, there is no single version that counts.
• The same detail is typed in two or more places. The job in the sheet, the date in the diary, the materials in a note, the amount in the invoicing tool. Every extra place is a place it can drift.
• The status cannot be read, only remembered. If the "done?" column only makes sense to the person filling it in, that is notes, not records.
• History disappears. Who moved the date and why is not in the sheet. On a complaint or a dispute, that is the first question asked.
• A customer asks something you have to go and look for. When answering "when will it be ready" takes more than a minute, you are paying for the search with your own time.
• You cannot take a week off. A spreadsheet without the person who keeps it is just a list. That is the most expensive sign of all.

One or two of these is normal. When four of them fit, the record keeping itself is what slows you down.

What it costs before anything changes

A lost job is obvious. The invisible part is worse: time spent retyping, questions between people, invoices corrected after the fact, and dates that slip because nobody was watching them.

We will not quote you a percentage saved, because it lands differently in every firm. You can work it out yourself, and you should: how many times a week does somebody retype the same detail, and how long does it take.

What to do even if you build nothing

This can be done next week, for free:

• One sheet, one place. Not in an email attachment, not on a desktop, one shared version.
• A status column with fixed words. Booked, in progress, waiting on parts, done, invoiced. No free typing.
• A date and a name against every change of date. A notes column will do, as long as people write in it.
• One job number that appears on the quote, the delivery note and the invoice.

Run that for a month and you will see where it hurts most. That is also the brief for the first stage of a custom system, and it beats any questionnaire.

When a custom system is worth it

There are plenty of off-the-shelf job tools, and for a firm doing one thing they make sense. Building your own pays off where you run several activities at once and no package joins them up: manufacturing and a shop, installations and stock, servicing and a website.

The difference fits in one sentence: in a package you record the job, in your own system the job travels through the business. An enquiry arrives, a quote goes out, materials come off stock, an invoice is raised. Nothing is retyped, because it was in one place from the start.

The spreadsheet does not have to die. It stays as an export you can pull whenever you need it. It just stops being the place the business lives.

How we start

We do not build the whole thing at once. The first stage takes whatever slows you down most, usually job tracking with dates, at a fixed price you know before we begin. You use it, and then you decide whether we carry on.

For websites you get the price straight away. For a system you get a fixed price for each stage before that stage starts. Prices and scope are on one page.

If you are not sure it makes sense in your firm, book a free call. We will also tell you when building your own is not worth it.