Tracking repairs in Excel: when the spreadsheet stops working

Most workshops start tracking repairs in a spreadsheet — and they are right to. Excel or Google Sheets are free, familiar and flexible. This page is about where a spreadsheet copes, where it starts letting you down, and how to keep it so that it lasts longer. And, if you decide to move to software, what exactly changes.

What a spreadsheet does well

• It costs nothing and is already on your computer.
• It is flexible: need a new column — add it in a second.
• It is familiar: nobody needs training.
• Google Sheets open on a phone and let two people work at once.

For a workshop with one technician and a few repairs a week, that is plenty. There is no point switching to software just because “that is what the big shops do”.

Where the spreadsheet breaks

The problems do not appear at once but as you grow — more repairs, a second person, the first dispute with a customer. The usual weak points:

• No job sheet. You cannot hand a spreadsheet row to a customer. The form has to be filled in separately — and the data is already in two places.
• No record of who changed what. The price in a row was 900 and is now 1,400 — who changed it and when? The spreadsheet will not say, and that is exactly the question that comes up in a dispute with a customer or a technician.
• Everyone sees everything. The front desk sees the month’s takings, the technician sees every customer’s phone number, and anyone can accidentally delete a row or sort just one column.
• Customers get duplicated. The same customer appears in ten rows written three ways: “Ivanenko”, “Ivanenko O.”, “Oleh (Samsung)”. Finding all of their repairs by phone number becomes a job of its own.
• Overdue jobs are invisible. To see that a date has passed you colour cells by hand or set up conditional formatting that breaks after the first sort.
• Reports are fragile. A formula for “what each technician earned” works until someone inserts a row in the middle or types an amount with a space in it.
• Working at the same time. Two people cannot work in one Excel file; in Google Sheets they can, but simultaneous edits to the same row quietly overwrite each other.

Signs it is time to switch

None of the problems above forces a switch on its own. But if two or three of these apply, the spreadsheet is already costing you more than it seems:

• more than thirty repairs a month;
• more than one person works in the spreadsheet;
• you have argued with a customer at least once about a device’s condition or the promised price;
• a row has gone missing or someone’s edit has been overwritten at least once;
• you work out technicians’ pay by hand, checking the spreadsheet against the till.

If you stay with Excel: how to keep the spreadsheet properly

If a spreadsheet is enough for you, this is what will protect it from most problems.

One repair, one row. Do not merge cells or put several devices in one row. The columns you cannot do without:

1. job number (running, never repeated);
2. date booked in;
3. customer — surname and first name;
4. phone — always in the same format, e.g. 0671234567;
5. device and model;
6. serial number or IMEI;
7. fault in the customer’s words;
8. condition and accessories;
9. promised date;
10. status;
11. price;
12. date paid;
13. date collected;
14. technician.

Status from a list only. Add data validation with a drop-down: “booked in”, “in progress”, “waiting for part”, “ready”, “collected”. Then filtering by status works instead of breaking on “ready”, “Ready” and “ready ”.

Delete nothing. A refused repair is a status too, not a deleted row. Otherwise the numbers get gaps and there is no way to reconstruct what happened.

Freeze the header row and always sort the whole table, never a single column.

Make a copy every week into a separate folder, with the date in the file name. Google Sheets keeps a version history, but it will not help if the file is deleted or you lose access to the account.

What changes with software

If you do decide to switch, here is how the same problems look in ServiceCenterSoft:

• the job sheet prints from the same data as the records — nothing is written twice;
• every job sheet keeps a change history: who changed what and when — status, price, technician, dates;
• permissions are set per section: the front desk does not see money, technicians do not see the customer database;
• each customer exists once, with all their repairs on one card; search by any digits of the phone number;
• overdue jobs turn red by themselves, no conditional formatting needed;
• the technician report is calculated from the job sheets themselves, so no formulas to break;
• two or ten people can work at the same time, from a computer or a phone.

What the software lacks and a spreadsheet has: free-form columns and export back to Excel. Job sheet fields are fixed; if you are missing a field of your own, that is custom work.

How to move from a spreadsheet

There are two ways. The first is simply to start: hand back old repairs from the spreadsheet and book new ones into the software. Within a few weeks the spreadsheet becomes an archive by itself. The second is to migrate: if the spreadsheet is large and tidy, we will load the customers and repairs into the software. Tell us how many rows it has and which columns.

Prices are on the pricing page, and you can look at the software without signing up in the demo.

Frequently asked questions