The case for a spreadsheet is that it is free and it does what you tell it. Both are true. The problem is the second half: it only ever does what you tell it, every single time.
Count the hours honestly
Take a normal week and count, per order:
| Task | Typical time |
|---|---|
| Re-typing customer and address details | 3 to 5 min |
| Building the price from scratch | 5 to 15 min |
| Producing and sending a proof | 5 min |
| Chasing approval by hand | 5 to 15 min |
| Answering "where is my order" | 3 to 8 min |
| Re-typing the order into an invoice | 5 min |
| Working out what to order in blanks | 5 to 10 min |
That is 30 to 60 minutes per order of pure administration, none of which decorates a garment. At 40 orders a month and a £30 loaded hourly cost, that is £600 to £1,200 a month, most of which is your own time as the owner.
Then count what falls through
Harder to measure, more expensive:
- Quotes never followed up. A conversion rate you cannot see cannot be improved.
- Approvals sitting for days because nobody was chasing. See cutting approval time.
- Jobs late because nobody saw them coming. A spreadsheet does not raise its hand.
- Prices drifting between quotes and between staff, because the arithmetic is redone each time.
- Reprints with no approval trail, so you absorb costs that were not yours. See handling a reprint request.
- Reorders quoted from scratch because last year's job is unfindable.
Where a spreadsheet genuinely wins
Be fair about this. A spreadsheet is the right tool when:
- You do a handful of large repeat jobs a month for two or three customers.
- One person handles everything and holds it all in their head.
- Your pricing is genuinely simple, one method, few variables.
- You are testing whether the business works at all.
If that is you, buying software is premature and you should keep your money.
The signals that you have passed the point
- You have re-typed the same customer's address more than once this week.
- You have chased an approval by text.
- You cannot answer "what is due Friday" without opening two files.
- Someone has asked you for a status you had to go and look up.
- Two quotes for similar jobs came out at noticeably different prices.
- You have discovered a stockout on the morning of a print.
Three or more of those and the arithmetic has already decided.
Move in an hour, not a project
Migrating from spreadsheets is the easiest migration there is, because a spreadsheet is already tabular. Customers, products and historical orders paste into an import template. Most shops are done in under an hour. See switching print shop software for the harder case of moving between systems, and our spreadsheet comparison for the direct version of this argument.