PeelBoard vs spreadsheets

What a spreadsheet is genuinely good at

A sheet is free, it opens on anything, and it has no opinion about your business. You can put a column wherever you want, write a formula nobody else would understand, and change your whole pricing model on a Tuesday night without asking anyone. For a one-van operation doing twelve cars a week, that flexibility beats every feature list on this site.

It is also the fastest tool in the world for a question you will ask once. What does a 70-inch roll cost me per square foot at three different landed prices? What happens to my month if I raise ceramic tint by $40? Open a sheet, type six cells, get an answer. Nothing in PeelBoard replaces that, and nothing should.

Where a shop's spreadsheet actually breaks

The break is not dramatic. The sheet keeps working; it just stops being true, and it stops being the thing anybody looks at.

1. The pricing grid goes stale

Tint pricing is not one number. It is vehicle class × film tier × package, and each of those has real branches: a coupe is not a crew cab, dyed is not ceramic is not the top-tier line, and a full car is not a visor-and-two-fronts. Build that honestly in a sheet and you get a grid with hundreds of cells. Then your supplier changes one film line, or you drop a tier, or you add PPF coverage packages and ceramic on top — and now you are re-typing a grid instead of quoting. Most shops quietly stop maintaining it and start pricing from memory, which is the point at which the sheet is decoration.

2. There is nothing for the customer to look at

A spreadsheet cell is not a quote. It becomes a text message with a number in it, or a screenshot, or a PDF export that looks like a spreadsheet. Nobody upsells that way. What sells a mid tier is three priced options in front of the customer — good, better, best — where the middle one looks obviously sensible. A sheet cannot show that, cannot record which one they opened, and cannot tell you they approved it at 9:40pm on a Sunday.

3. No deposit, no payment

A sheet cannot hold a booking or take money. So the deposit conversation becomes a phone call you have to make, which means half the time it does not happen, which means the calendar fills with appointments nobody has paid a cent toward. Deposits are the single cheapest fix for no-shows, and a spreadsheet structurally cannot take one.

4. No confirmations, no reminders, no review requests

Every reminder text out of a spreadsheet is a human deciding to send it. That human is under a car. Same for the review request that should go out the afternoon the customer paid and saw their car in the sun — the highest-yield text your shop will ever send, and the one that never gets sent by hand.

5. Film is counted in feet, and nobody updates the sheet after a job

You can absolutely track rolls in a spreadsheet. The problem is the update: after a long install, at 6pm, somebody has to open the file and subtract the footage. It does not happen. Two weeks later you are on the phone to your supplier because you found out mid-job that the 20% ceramic roll had eleven feet left.

6. One person's laptop

A cloud sheet syncs, so this is less bad than it used to be. It is still the case that you cannot let an installer see the job board without also handing them every price you charge, and the usual answer — a second copy with the money columns deleted — creates a second version of the truth. Add a tech, add a second bay, and the sheet becomes the thing everybody has a slightly different copy of.

What each one costs

When a spreadsheet is still the right answer

If you are one person, you quote from memory because you have priced the same six vehicles for years, you take cash and card through a reader, and you do not carry more than two or three rolls at a time — stay in the sheet. Software you half-fill-in is worse than a sheet you actually keep current, and the shop that runs a tidy spreadsheet beats the shop with three abandoned subscriptions every single time. The same goes for the sheet you use as a scratch pad: keep it forever. It costs nothing and it is faster than any report.

What should make you look up is any of these: you are quoting more than you can remember, a second pair of hands is in the bay, customers are asking to book without calling, you have had two no-shows in a month, or you found out a roll was nearly empty while a car was already masked. Those are the five things a price book, deposits, reminders and film-by-the-foot exist to fix, and none of them are a discipline problem you can solve by being more organised in the sheet.

Moving over without a weekend project

Do it in the order a job happens, not all at once. Type in your real price book first — the film tiers, the packages, the add-ons, the vehicle classes — and send your next quote as a proposal with three priced options instead of a text message. Turn deposits on once you trust it. Then confirmations and reminders. Film inventory last, because that one only works if you start from a real count, so do it the morning a new roll arrives. The spreadsheet stays open the whole time; it just stops being the thing that decides your prices.

Each trade has its own price book, so if you do tint and coatings and detailing you are not squeezing all three into one form. There are pages for window tint, PPF, ceramic coating, detailing, vinyl wrap and flat glass, and the pricing page has the plan limits in full.

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