A spreadsheet is free, flexible and completely under your control. It also relies on you, at night, remembering a week you have already stopped thinking about.
13 September 2026 · 6 min read
Plenty of profitable trade businesses run on a spreadsheet, and anyone who tells you it is automatically the wrong answer is selling something. It is a real option with real advantages. It also has one specific failure mode, and knowing what that is matters more than any feature comparison.
It costs nothing, it does exactly what you tell it, nobody can change it under you, and you can see every figure at once. For a handful of jobs a month, with a person who is comfortable in a spreadsheet and does the entry reliably, it is hard to beat. If that is you and it is working, it is working.
Spreadsheets need a sitting-down moment. That moment is Sunday night, after the week has happened, when you are reconstructing Tuesday from memory and a handful of receipts. What gets lost is not the big invoice — it is the small material purchase, the extra half hour, the trip to the merchant. Those are exactly the numbers that tell you whether a job made money, which is the reason you started tracking in the first place.
Version confusion, when the file exists on the laptop and in an email attachment and on a phone. Fragility, because one accidental sort ruins a column and nobody notices for a month. And output — a spreadsheet is a place to type things, not a system that hands a customer a numbered invoice or hands your accountant a clean export.
Not features. Two things: capture at the moment the work happens, and structured output at the end. A job with its materials attached as you bought them beats a job reconstructed six days later, and an export that produces income, expenses, mileage and CIS for a chosen period beats a tab you tidy up in January. If neither of those is a problem for you, a spreadsheet is fine.
You do not have to choose between a spreadsheet and learning a platform. Capturing as you go through WhatsApp — “Materials: £45 copper pipe”, a photo of the receipt, “45 miles to the Hall job” — gets you the moment-of-work capture without a system to learn, and the structured export at the other end. That is what GraftG does, and it starts at £14/month on Solo with a 14-day free trial. See how job tracking works.
If your job volume is low, your entry discipline is genuinely good, and your accountant is happy with what you hand over, do not change anything — moving systems has a cost of its own. The honest triggers for moving are: you have lost track of who owes you what, you cannot say which jobs made money, or the Sunday session has quietly stopped happening. Two out of three and it is time.
Do not run both for six months. Pick a date, usually the start of a month or a tax year, close the spreadsheet off and archive it as a record, and start the new system fresh. Half-in, half-out is worse than either. Running your paperwork from the van covers the practical setup.
For low job volumes and someone who reliably does the data entry, yes. Its weakness is that entry happens after the fact, so small materials, extra hours and merchant trips get lost — and those are exactly the figures that reveal whether a job was profitable.
The honest triggers are losing track of who owes you money, being unable to say which jobs made money, or simply no longer doing the weekly entry session. If none of those apply, changing systems may cost you more than it saves.
Pick a clean start date, ideally the beginning of a month or tax year, archive the spreadsheet as a record of everything before that point, and run only the new system afterwards. Running both in parallel for months is where data gets lost.
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