Replacing a 40-Tab Spreadsheet With a Job Tracker Field Teams Actually Use

The problem

Every job the company took on lived in a single shared spreadsheet with roughly forty tabs. Engineers in the field reported completions to a WhatsApp group. An office administrator read that group each morning, updated the spreadsheet, and once a week worked out what could be invoiced.

Three things kept going wrong:

• Jobs fell through the cracks. Work completed on a Friday afternoon sometimes never made it into the spreadsheet at all. Nobody knew how often this happened, which turned out to be the most expensive part.
• The spreadsheet was constantly locked. With five people needing it, someone always had it open. Editing became a negotiation.
• Invoicing lagged by a week and a half. The admin had to reconstruct what happened from chat messages, chasing engineers for details about jobs they’d finished days earlier.

The owner’s actual request was “can you make the spreadsheet faster.” The real problem was that a spreadsheet was doing the job of a system.

What I built

A focused job tracker — not a platform, not a suite. Four things:

A mobile job view for engineers. Open the link, see today’s jobs, mark one complete, add photos and notes, capture a signature. Designed for one hand, poor signal, and a van. Offline-first, syncing when a connection returns.

A live schedule board for the office. Every job, its state, and who’s on it — updating in real time. The daily “where are we” phone calls stopped within the first week.

Automatic invoice drafting. A completed job with its time, materials, and photos generates a draft invoice in their existing accounting system immediately. The admin reviews and sends in batches; nothing is reconstructed from memory.

An exception report. Jobs completed but not invoiced, jobs scheduled but not started, engineers with no jobs assigned. This one screen surfaced the revenue leak that had been invisible for years.

Decisions worth noting

I kept their accounting software. They’d have accepted a rebuild of invoicing into the new system. It would have added two months and considerable risk for no benefit. The tracker pushes drafts into what they already use and their accountant never had to change anything.

Offline came first, not later. Engineers work in plant rooms and basements. An app that needs signal to record a completion doesn’t get used — it gets worked around, and then you have two systems.

We shipped in five weeks, not five months. Version one had no customer portal, no reporting suite, no inventory. Those came later, informed by three months of real usage. Two of the features on the original wishlist were quietly dropped once it became clear nobody wanted them.

The results

Within the first quarter, the gap between finishing a job and invoicing it went from around eleven days to under two. Administrative time dropped by about twenty-two hours a week across the office.

The number that surprised everyone was the recovered revenue. In the first year, work that would previously have slipped through unbilled — but was now captured automatically — came to roughly £68,000. The build paid for itself in under three months on that line alone.

---

Note: this is a representative case study written to illustrate the shape of a typical engagement while real client write-ups are being prepared and approved. Get in touch if you’d like to talk through a comparable project.