Excel Alternative for Builders: OpSpot vs Spreadsheets

Short answer: stay with a spreadsheet if you run a few jobs at a time, one person does all the scheduling and your subcontractors are happy to get their bookings by text. Move to OpSpot when you're juggling several jobs with crews and subcontractors over many days: you need to see who's free by trade, avoid double bookings, keep each subcontractor up to date with their bookings, and know whose licence or insurance is about to expire.

Builders who use OpSpot today moved from spreadsheets, ClickHome and Jobber. This page is based on what they told us.

At a glance

Where a spreadsheet is enough

• It costs nothing extra, and everyone in the office already knows how to use it.
• It's completely flexible: any columns, any layout, any formula.
• For a handful of jobs with one person scheduling, it's often all you need.
• Your data stays in a file you own, which you can open anywhere.

Where spreadsheets break

• Several jobs, several trades, many days. A grid can show one week or one job, but it can't tell you that the tiler you're about to book is already on another job on Thursday. OpSpot's availability lookup shows which staff and subcontractors are free by job type over the next four weeks (see Crew and subcontractor availability by trade).
• Multi-day bookings with different people each day, which in a spreadsheet means copying rows and hoping they stay in sync (see Scheduling crews with the calendar, planner and Gantt).
• Telling subcontractors. Every change means another message. In OpSpot, each subcontractor sees their own bookings, not your whole calendar, and gets an email reminder when you choose.
• What you owe each subcontractor, kept against their work orders rather than in a separate sheet (see Work orders and subcontractor payments).
• Expired licences and insurance, which a spreadsheet won't warn you about (see Subcontractor licence and insurance tracking).
• Proof from site: checklists with photos and QR code sign-in, instead of photos lost in a group chat (see Site checklists with photo proof).
• Two people editing at once, and nobody sure which copy is current.

Moving from spreadsheets to OpSpot

1. Book a 30-minute chat and show us your spreadsheets and how you run a typical job today.
2. Send us your spreadsheets. We bring your clients, projects and price list across for you. That's how we've onboarded builders who ran their jobs in spreadsheets.
3. Set up your job types and subcontractors, with their licences and insurance.
4. Run your next job in OpSpot. Keep the spreadsheet for anything OpSpot doesn't cover yet.

FAQ

Can I import my spreadsheets into OpSpot? Yes. We do it for you during onboarding: send us your clients, projects and price list as spreadsheets and we'll bring them across.

Is there a free construction scheduling spreadsheet template? Plenty of builders start with a simple weekly grid: one row per person or subcontractor, one column per day, and the job name in each cell. It works until you have several jobs running at once and need to see who's free by trade, which is when a scheduling tool pays off.

How much does OpSpot cost? OpSpot is free for up to 5 users. Paid plans average about US$29.99 per user a month; we tailor the plan to your team after a 30-minute chat.

Does OpSpot have a mobile app? OpSpot runs in the browser on any phone or tablet and can be installed on your home screen like an app. It isn't in the App Store or Google Play.

Excel and Google Sheets are trademarks of their owners. Spotted something out of date? Tell us at support@opspot.com.