Maintenance tracking in a spreadsheet: when it works, and five signs it has stopped
The spreadsheet is the real market leader and it is not a mistake. Five specific questions that tell you whether yours is still doing the job — and a free one if it is.
In this article
- The five questions
- Scoring it
- If you are staying, use a better sheet
- What a CMMS is, and why it is probably not the answer
- Where Itefy fits
The maintenance tab on the gear sheet. The "last serviced" column is blank for about half the items. Two people overwrote each other last week. And the person who set the whole thing up left in the spring.
Before anything else: the spreadsheet is not a mistake. It is the most widely used maintenance system there is, by an enormous margin, and for a lot of teams it is the correct tool — free, already installed, and understood by everybody without training. Most articles on this subject open by treating it as an embarrassment. That is a sales tactic, not an analysis.
What is true is that it fails in five specific ways, and they are structural rather than a matter of discipline. Here is how to tell whether yours has reached them.
The five questions
Answer honestly. Not "could we in principle" — does it, on a normal Thursday.
1. Can two people update it at the same time?
Cloud sheets handle this technically. The failure is subtler: two people editing the same rows, one pasting over a column, a filter left applied that hides half the data from the next person. If your sheet has ever needed restoring from version history, this one is a fail.
2. Can the person holding the item record something where they stand?
This is the one that decides whether the data is real. If logging a fault means going back to a desk, then faults are logged from memory at the end of the week, or not at all. The record is then not a record of what happened — it is a record of what somebody remembered.
3. Does anything tell you a date has passed?
A spreadsheet will hold a next due date perfectly well. It will not do anything about it. Somebody has to open the file, sort it, and look — and the months when nobody does are exactly the busy months when the service gets missed.
You can colour overdue rows red. It still requires someone to open the file.
4. Can you see one item's whole history in one place?
"What has happened to this camera since we bought it?" A sheet can answer this with a filter, if every row is tagged with the item. In practice, maintenance sheets are usually organised by date or by month, and the per-item view is a reconstruction. If nobody has ever actually run it, you do not have it.
5. Does it survive its keeper leaving?
The hardest one. There is usually a person who knows which columns matter, which entries are stale, and what the colour coding means. When they leave, a file that made sense becomes a file people are afraid to change.
Scoring it
Fail none or one: stay on the sheet. Genuinely. Fix the one thing and get on with your work.
Fail two: you are at the point where it is costing you — usually in missed services and in time spent reconstructing rather than recording. Worth an afternoon looking at alternatives.
Fail three or more: the sheet is producing a version of reality rather than reflecting one, and the decisions you make from it are unreliable.
If you are staying, use a better sheet
Most maintenance sheets are worse than they need to be because they grew rather than being designed. Two things worth fixing today:
- One row per event, with an item column — not one column per month, and not a separate tab per item. See the maintenance log template for the six columns that matter.
- A separate schedule tab for what is due, sorted by next-due date, distinct from the log of what happened. Mixing the two is why sheets rot. There is a schedule template for that half.
There is also a free equipment tracking spreadsheet which records a service and updates the item in one action rather than two — though a spreadsheet, ours included, still cannot tell you that an interval has lapsed. That is question 3, and no sheet passes it.
What a CMMS is, and why it is probably not the answer
If you go looking for software, the category that dominates the results is the CMMS: work orders, technician assignment, parts inventory, cost centres. It is a serious and well-built kind of product.
It is also built for machinery that stays put — a plant, a hospital, a housing stock — with a maintenance department to run it. If your equipment is booked out to people and comes back, a CMMS has no place to put that, and you will pay for a work-order engine you never use. What a CMMS is and whether you need one goes through the distinction.
Where Itefy fits
Itefy is the other shape: a register of equipment that moves, with maintenance attached to the items rather than to work orders.
Against the five questions — several people can work at once without overwriting each other; anyone can scan an item and log a fault or a service from a phone at the shelf, which is question 2; recurring maintenance reminds you before it lapses rather than waiting to be noticed, which is question 3; every item carries its own complete history as one screen, which is question 4; and none of it depends on one person understanding the file, which is question 5.
From $15 a month, with a 14-day free trial and no card. If you failed one question, the honest recommendation is still the spreadsheet.
Frequently Asked Questions
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No. It is the most common way, it is free, everybody can already use it, and for one person looking after a few dozen items it is genuinely the right tool. It fails for specific structural reasons, not because it is unserious.
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A CMMS is built around work orders on machinery that stays put, with technicians and a parts inventory. If you have a maintenance department, buy one. If your gear moves between people and your problem is that nobody knew a service was due, it is the wrong shape and a large expense.
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Up to a point — a conditional-format rule can colour overdue rows red. It still requires somebody to open the file to see it, which is the actual failure. A reminder that only fires when you look is not a reminder.