From spreadsheets to a shared schedule in 48 hours

The spreadsheet was never the problem

A well-built spreadsheet is a precise instrument, and the people who run cleaning operations built their rotas in one because it fitted the work: a tab per contract, colours per crew, a formula that adds the hours up. Nothing about that is careless, and nothing about this article is an argument against the people who did it.

The problem is not the tool. It is that the file became the system of record — and a system of record has three requirements a file cannot meet. It has to be the same for everyone. It has to keep what happened, not just what was planned. And it has to still be true on the week the person who built it is on holiday.

Where it breaks

• One file per site, and no file that holds the portfolio. Adding them up is somebody’s Friday afternoon.
• One editor at a time. The second person to open it works on a copy, and the copies diverge silently.
• The rota is a plan; the hours are a fact. The file holds both, in the same cells, and the difference between them disappears the moment somebody types over it.
• Nothing is versioned, so “what did we agree with that client in March” is a question with no answer in the file.
• The client asks for proof, and the proof is a screenshot.

None of those is a spreadsheet failing at something a spreadsheet was designed for. They are all the same failure: a plan and a record sharing one place, with no rule about which of the two wins.

What the 48 hours actually contain

The replacement is not a migration project, which is the part most people expect to be told and then are not. It runs in three steps:

1. The setup call. Your sites, your crew, the modules your contracts need. Thirty minutes, and it is a conversation about how you work rather than a form to fill in.
2. The import. Sites, price lists and the first rota go in, and the NFC tags are placed at the sites. The rota being imported is the file you already have — it does not need cleaning first.
3. The first shift. The workers are in the app, the first clock-in happens against the tag, the checklist is signed. From that point the record is running by itself.

By the end of the second day the first shift has been clocked in, checked and recorded, which means the record that will produce the timesheet and the invoice already exists. The spreadsheet is not deleted on the way out — it becomes a view, kept for the things it is genuinely good at.

The step-by-step version of this is on the onboarding page, and the scheduling side of it is here.

What you need before the call

• Your sites, and the price list per site.
• Who cleans where — the crew and their sites.
• The current rota, in whatever shape it is in today.
• The export format your payroll platform expects, if it has one.

That is the whole list. There is no data cleanup step, because there is nothing to clean: what you have is a rota, and a rota imports.

What changes on the Monday after

The manager stops being the junction box. The rota is still made by a person — it is the plan, and the plan is where a manager works — but the hours now arrive from the site as the shifts happen, so the manager’s week no longer contains the hour where they retype a week of paper into a spreadsheet. What arrives at the end of the month is a record to review, not a file to reconstruct.