Why Spreadsheets Don't Work for Work Management (Google Sheets vs. SmartSuite Comparison)

I feel like there's an unofficial belief in most companies that when times get tough, we really just need an Excel spreadsheet, right? Like is anyone else guilty of doing this? You know, there's a complex process or procedure I need to follow and I can't wrap my head around it in a simple email. Open the Google sheets or the Excel file and start building out some kind of structure to get things organized. For me, this was always my go to and I still think this is a very common way of solving process challenges in businesses today. Problem is, a lot has changed in how people work since the days of Excel. You know, rising to power, a lot has changed and one of the biggest changes is the development of the work management software space. Now I know that sounds like fancy terminology, but basically there's this arena of software being created today, such as our sponsor today, SmartSuite. They allow us to do spreadsheet style stuff, but also do it at a higher level by being able to track things like tasks and detailed information that is really challenging to keep formatted and organized inside a spreadsheet. So in this video I want to dedicate it to my former self pre knowing about SmartSuite and other things like it. And I want to compare today the pros and cons of using a Google Sheet or an Excel file. Kind of the same thing in this application versus a work management platform like SmartSuite. What's the difference between them? Why should you use one versus the other? And why are both really important to have in your business arsenal when it comes to systemizing your business or just getting it processed down? So let's just go right in. Today I'm going to be comparing on design, pricing, flexibility and features. So we've got four criteria to go through, the biggest of which will be the features discussion. We're going to start off though with design for our comparison purposes here. I'm going to take you inside this example spreadsheet, which to me seems like something I have seen. My real estate investor clients, they've brought me spreadsheets that look similar to this, perhaps with much better detail. And this is what a typical spreadsheet might look like. We've got kind of some drop down data validation happening here. We've got some notes, maybe if we're lucky, we've got some colored formatting and this is kind of what a typical spreadsheet based process might look like when it comes in here. The look of a sheet is very familiar, just like a spreadsheet. We're all used to this kind of layout, but it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of clarity. For example, if I click on this information, very few folks will actually have notes that explain what address we're supposed to put here. Very often we'll end up in situations where data is not properly formatted. It's inconsistent throughout. And when we're scrolling left to right or navigating the various tabs in these spreadsheets, there's a little bit of a challenge for folks who are new to this spreadsheet arena to know where to go for what information. It's hard to see what to focus on in a spreadsheet because everything looks equally important. If you had a few hundred doors or a few hundred properties on this spreadsheet, you can imagine trying to track all of the real estate investment information could become a little bit of a challenge because it's just not very pretty and isn't going to work for every brain type, particularly those who just kind of shut down when they see a big grid of information. Let's compare this with something like SmartSuite. SmartSuite is a little bit different than a spreadsheet in that it has this layer of interface covering it. Yes, at its core, if we go inside some of these areas in SmartSuite, we're gonna see data just like you see in a spreadsheet. But because this is a software that is trying very hard to make itself appealing to look at, it becomes more digestible. We suddenly have the ability to view things in different ways depending on how our brain likes to see information. We can group things in different ways based on it, without changing the underlying data and without even going into any of the details here. As I just kind of hover around the look of a piece of software like this that is allowing you interact with data as compared to a simple spreadsheet, I don't think I need to go into too much detail as to why the SmartSuite option and the software option is going to be a little bit more appealing to folks who are allergic to spreadsheets or just prefer a slightly prettier work environment. And ultimately, at the end of the day, we need people to use this tool. So whatever we're building it in, if it's pretty and it's appealing and it's understandable, that's gotta be a good thing. Absolutely. Going to give this over to SmartSuite as our work management platform as being just the winner in the design category. Ooh, quick reminder here. I am actually demonstrating the template built into SmartSuite. For project management. It's a really, really powerful template and it's available for free. So if you'd like to try out this exact Same template demo SmartSuite while you're at it, check out the affiliate link below. It's absolutely free to try and it's a really cool template that you're probably gonna wanna play around with. So check that out if you are interested in this or any related topic. Back to the video. Now, the next category is pricing. And I'm going to go over this pretty quickly as well, because I think we all know that this is a bit of an elephant in the room when it comes to the cost of spreadsheets. Most of us already have Microsoft Office or already are paying for something that includes spreadsheets. So the cost of having a spreadsheet for something is generally $0 for the actual spreadsheet. When we compare that to a work management platform or we are looking at per user billing, which can feel a little bit heavy when we compare it. So something like $0 a month for three users, but then we jump up to $10 per month. Well, if you have 10 people in that spreadsheet, this is definitely a big jump in the investment from 100 per month, from zero per month. So when it comes to pricing, the winner here is probably going to be for most people, the spreadsheet option. But remember, you get what you pay for. And with that, let's talk a little bit about flexibility inside a spreadsheet. As you all probably know, we have an insane amount of flexibility. We can change what anything says or means, how it's calculated, a Google sheet or Excel file. They're super, super flexible. But the challenge is they are super, super flexible. Let's compare this over here with something like SmartSuite. This is a work management tool. Again, in here we have a similar amount of flexibility. We can change what the property name is called. We can just call it Name, or we can change how math is working inside the platform. We can have it count up different fields. We can add certain calculations or sums happening to each section or column. We can choose to show or hide different information or even create our own custom fields such as mailing address if it's different than the main address. We also have the ability to customize a whole lot here. But the difference with a work management tool like this is we also have the ability to turn off that editability. So we could go inside, say this whole application and say, hey, when it comes to properties, I only want to allow Layla, I Only want Layla to have full access to this. Everyone else, I just want to be able to see things or maybe just comment on things. While we can do this by restricting cells inside Google Sheet, it's just much more limited. And I don't know about you, but I've been in countless companies where a spreadsheet is being used to track information and inevitably someone deletes the protection, someone deletes the column that's needed, and then the whole spreadsheet breaks. How many times have one of us experienced that? Yeah, there is no amount of protected sheets or ranges that allow us to have enough protection when it comes to a spreadsheet to use it on workflow critical processes. If there is something super important and it's in a spreadsheet, you and I both know it's inevitably going to end up broken at site some point. And what is the cost of that failure? What is the cost of that cell being accidentally deleted or someone accidentally writing the wrong number in here or overriding the information and losing it? What is that cost? That's kind of the challenge when it comes to flexibility. Spreadsheets are much more flexible to a fault. While work management tools are built with permissions in mind and at the solution level, the app level, and soon even the record level, we can lock things down and make sure things aren't happening without our knowledge, that there's an audit trail of every change, and that we can truly lock things down when they are so important that we don't want them to be mistakenly removed. I think that's a big difference between these two spaces and one of the main features the software component adds on, in addition to just being more aesthetically pleasing. Now, when it comes to other features beyond just flexibility, I think there are three standouts when it comes to a spreadsheet. And the main one, which I think is the obvious one in all of our minds, but I want to say it anyway, is the ease of sharing spreadsheets. Because of their flexibility and kind of ubiquitous nature, they're super easy to share with outside stakeholders, to share with your property manager, to share with your collaborator. If you're looking to communicate information in this grid format that anyone can understand and that anyone could export and upload somewhere else. Spreadsheets are really nice for that universal understanding. That's in part a nod to their kind of prominence historically. Right. The past is the past, but it's still there and it still is carried with us. That's the first feature that I think makes spreadsheets a really appealing option for when you need that external information sharing, whether to export and import or to just share with outsiders. The second major feature I think spreadsheets do a great job of are things like extensions and macros, because these tools are in and of themselves quite simple. The ability to add things things on to your spreadsheet, either by recording macros or by utilizing scripts, is pretty powerful. Spreadsheets have been around for so long that there are so many layers of tools that you can add on top of them to give them more power, as you see here. This could be macros, add ons, whatever else you're looking to add. You can add custom functionality to your spreadsheet now. Sort of like the Play Store that your phone might use if you're looking to download a new app. Just because you can add a lot of things to it doesn't mean it's necessarily for the best, as you all have probably experienced some sometimes add ons or macros malfunction. Maybe they conflict with each other because we're kind of duct taping together solutions. It requires a good amount of personal know how, time and oversight to make sure all those little components you're custom building together don't break if you're going to push the limits in that way. But that is the second standout feature, the ability to add extensions, macros and add ons to those spreadsheets that are so universally available now. The third major feature of spreadsheets that I don't want to under appreciate here is the ability to customize your data. I think spreadsheets are really the leaders when it comes to things like formatting your numbers in specific formats, your custom date and time format, your custom month and year format. Being able to set things in a way that suits your brain and matches the situation you are trying to build back almost to flexibility. Spreadsheets have a lot of options around this formatting, where most software and work management platforms are slightly more restrictive in that they only give you a handful of options and not, you know, the whopping few dozen that are here now let's flip over to the work management software land and let me highlight some features there that I think are going to stand out again. In addition to the permissions topic that we've already touched on, if I go back into SmartSuite, the first feature that I think is really a standout when it comes to all work management platforms, but particularly SmartSuite, the ability to have one set of data like this here, these three apartment buildings we have. But then take this data and without breaking anything, without having to copy and paste and take a new sheet or do lookups, I can change how this data appears. Like I could see them all on a map view. So I can see exactly where these properties are. Once here, I can select the address field and see a map of all of my property locations. We can see these kind of all here on my map. And this hasn't changed my data. This hasn't forced me to install a third party macro and hope it doesn't steal my data or do anything shady. This is just by adding alternative views, viewing the same data in multiple ways. For folks who have a CEO who needs to see things differently than the contractor who needs to see things differently than the property manager to being able to change this information out into different formats, that's an incredibly valuable feature. Now the second feature that I think work management tools really do a great job of, which a spreadsheet just cannot get close to, is the ability to allow you to track tasks. And I don't just mean, you know, like, hey, we need to do something. Of course you could have that in a spreadsheet called Things we Need to do. But when we're inside a work management platform, we're able to go inside, say this record here. We can go down in all these areas. We can actually create things like a checklist field. And what's so interesting about this is we can take the items inside this checklist and give them both assignees and due dates. So for example, clean out H Vac system. We need to do some annual cleaning on this. We'll set our due date for Friday and we're going to sign it out to that Layla person and click add item. Now this is really cool because all of a sudden I've created tasks inside of the overall apartment. And while this is nice just aesthetically, what this will then do is send Layla a note both a reminder right now saying she got assigned something in her notifications. But when that day actually arrives, that Layla person can go up here in the corner of her screen to my work and see a list of all of the tasks she has to do. In this case, we can see the clean out the H Vac system task with the full context of which property I'm working on is going to show up right in my to do list. I don't need to be reminded by the property manager five times. I don't need to compulsively check my spreadsheet every day. I'm going to be reminded just by the fact that I was able to create a task inside this platform right alongside my data for any kind of information that that is mixing both just FYI info with actual tasks. This is a huge game changer because when we go back to the spreadsheet, we look at things like major capex dates next walkthrough. These are all tasks that someone's going to need to remember to go into the spreadsheet, find mark as done, change the date to the next year. Who wants to do all that manual work? Exactly. So for situations like this where we have a mixture of both tasks and just information, work management tools have a real strength of being able to organize both things in ways that make sense for both types of data. Now, last but not least, the third standout feature when it comes to work management tool is I think, the most impressive for those of us who might be property managers with too much to do or just folks trying to organize a project. And that is the ability to set up automations directly inside this tool. No need to set up macros or install things that you can't edit when you go inside the automation area. Inside, say, SmartSuite, create an automation. For example, I could say every Monday at 8am send an email to the CEO giving them a rundown of the condition of all of our properties. Or I could say, hey, every Tuesday send an email to everyone with assigned tasks reminding them to do those tasks. I can also use these automations for more than just reminders. For example, I could say when a form is submitted, such as a work order from one of our tenants, I could have a record which is like a task. Have a task be created for the contractor or a handyman to go around and fix that issue in their property. I can have it be created inside the requests list with all of the relevant information added in as fields. This is an example of an automation that could happen automatically without anyone being involved. Heck, we could even go further and say, hey, let's email the tenant, let them know we got their request. We could even send a text message to them and let them know that we've got their requests. In this way, we're able to build out these automated workflows that really reduce the amount of work for the project manager, the office manager, from trying to coordinate action based off of just a static spreadsheet. While a spreadsheet stores information, a work management tool really works your information, makes it work for you by allowing it to drive action and to cut out some of that middleman work that needs to happen when you're trying to manage priorities and tasks that aren't being directly assigned. So long story short here. Between spreadsheets and work management tools, which one do you need? Well, if you are a person who is just by yourself so you don't have to worry about flexibility, or you have a very tight budget, or you are only tracking very simple information that is a data set and not necessarily a mixture of tasks and other information, in that case, by all means use that spreadsheet. That'll be simple enough and suit your needs. But if you are someone who has multiple collaborators, if you have a mixture of data and tasks, and if you want your system to actually help you do the work instead of just be a place where you put information manually, I would strongly urge you to consider a work management platform such as SmartSuite. The amount of work a system like this can do for you can really offset your maybe even an entire employee's worth of work by having automations and other tools do that project management for you. So that is the difference in my view between a spreadsheet and a work management tool. And when I would use which. Next time you're presented with a process challenge in your business, I want you to look very carefully at what you are looking to manage and ask yourself, hmm, is a spreadsheet really the answer here? Odds are it might not be, but that's it for this video. Thanks so much for watching. If you want to try SmartSuite for yourself, check out the link in the description below. If you have any questions, drop down below. Drop a comment. Thanks so much for watching and until next time, enjoy the process.