Most facilities start their maintenance program in a spreadsheet. It is free, it is familiar, and it works — for a while. This guide is an honest comparison of where spreadsheets shine and where a purpose-built tool like MaintIQ saves real money.
Where spreadsheets win
- Free at any team size if you already have Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
- Familiar — every operations person has used one.
- Flexible — you can model any process in a sheet without asking IT.
- Portable — the data lives in a file you control.
For a single-site facility with one maintenance technician and fewer than 30 recurring tasks, a spreadsheet may be the right answer.
Where spreadsheets fail
Mobile usability
A spreadsheet on a phone is borderline unusable in the field. Technicians end up doing the work and updating the sheet later — which is when entries get forgotten or fabricated.
Audit trail
Excel and Sheets track edit history at the cell level, but it is hard to query. "Who marked the fire-extinguisher check complete on 12 March?" is a 10-minute archaeology session in a spreadsheet. In MaintIQ it is one filter.
Concurrent editing
Two technicians editing the same row in a shared Google Sheet can overwrite each other. MaintIQ uses row-level locking and merges changes.
Photo evidence
Spreadsheets do not store photos well. Pasting an image into Excel bloats the file and stops working in Sheets at scale.
SLA enforcement
A spreadsheet cannot ping a technician when a P1 work order has been open for 16 minutes. It cannot escalate to a manager when the technician does not respond. MaintIQ does both automatically.
Cross-facility roll-up
If you operate two or more sites, each one usually ends up in its own sheet. Combining them for a board report is a manual copy-paste exercise.
The cost comparison
| Scenario | Spreadsheet | MaintIQ |
|---|---|---|
| 1 facility, 1 tech, 30 tasks | $0 | Starter plan |
| 1 facility, 5 techs, 100 tasks | "free" but ~5 hours/week of admin | Starter plan |
| 3 facilities, 15 techs | Untenable | Growth plan |
| Incident review with auditor | 4–8 hours of spreadsheet archaeology | 5-minute filtered export |
When the spreadsheet admin time exceeds 4–6 hours a week, a CMMS is cheaper.
Migration path
If you are running on a spreadsheet today and considering MaintIQ:
- Export your cadences (the recurring rows) to CSV.
- Use the Admin → Cadences → Import tool to bulk-create cadences from the CSV.
- Keep the spreadsheet read-only for 30 days as a safety net.
- After 30 days, archive the spreadsheet and run from MaintIQ.
Most facilities complete migration in less than a day.
When to stay on a spreadsheet
- One facility, one technician, no compliance requirements, fewer than 30 recurring tasks.
- A two-month pilot where you are still defining your process.
In every other case, the spreadsheet is costing you more than you realise.