Welding job tracking spreadsheet vs Bead Board

It's always the same spreadsheet

A Jobs tab with job number, customer, description, due date. A Quotes tab with a markup formula the last guy wrote and nobody wants to touch. A Materials tab with last year's steel prices. It got you from 3 jobs a month to 8. Now you're at 15 and nobody can remember which number you gave Henderson last Tuesday.

The sheet worked fine when it was one person editing on a laptop. It stops working the day somebody else needs to see it.

Side by side

When the spreadsheet is still the right tool

Solo welder, five jobs a year out of the garage? Stay on the spreadsheet. Don't pay $99 a month to replace something that already works. Come back when you hire your first helper, or when a customer calls about a job from six months back and the sheet can't tell you what you charged.

When it starts costing you jobs

The spreadsheet starts losing you money the day it has to leave the laptop. A welder in the truck can't pinch-zoom through a Google Sheet with dirty gloves. A fabricator on the floor can't add in-progress photos to a row. Your wife updates a cell at the kitchen table the same minute you're adding one from your phone, and one of those changes just goes away. The spreadsheet doesn't tell you. You find out three weeks later when a customer calls and the number on their quote doesn't match the one in your file.

Then there's the pricing from memory problem. You charged $340 for a handrail bracket last spring. You remember that. You don't remember that it took you six hours and you barely made your shop rate. The sheet doesn't remember either, because the hours column is empty on half the rows.

Also worth reading: QuickBooks for the shop floor • WeldTrace (code welding) • Jobber (field services) • the whiteboard.