The sheet is the incumbent and it deserves the respect: it costs nothing, it does exactly what you decided it should, and there is no onboarding. Everything here is measured against it rather than against software. Three things it will not do, however you build it: it will not tell you a balance has gone unpaid, it will not give your customer a page, and its arithmetic drifts the moment there is more than one of you. Including the cases where the sheet should stay.
Google Sheets · checked 10 September 2026
We make Ordamo, so we are an interested party. What we can be is checkable: written by the people who built it for their own furniture studio in Buenos Aires, every price taken from the other side’s own page with the date we read it, and their wins listed above ours.
| Google Sheets | Ordamo | |
|---|---|---|
| Built around | A grid you design | Orders, deposits and production batches, already assembled |
| Price | $0, or $8 to $20 once for a ready-made template | $29/mo, one plan |
| Deposit and balance on one order | Two cells and a formula, until somebody overwrites one | Both, with dates, on the order itself |
| Something is overdue | Visible only if you look, and only if the formula still works | Unpaid and overdue sort to the top |
| What a production run cost per piece | A second tab and a division you maintain | A received batch writes what the run really cost onto its products |
| A page the customer can open | Share the file, or copy a message by hand | One link per order, no login, updates itself |
| Two people editing | Possible, and the reason most sheets have a rogue copy | Roles: owner, sales, production |
| Orders from a chat screenshot | Type them in | The assistant reads the screenshot into an order you confirm |
| Flexibility | Total — this is what it is for | None. Fixed model, on purpose |
| Who maintains it | You | Nobody |
Built for orders that take weeks to deliver, start in a message and get paid in parts.
Add a customer and their order
Deposit taken, balance still owed, and the date you promised.
Send your customer their order page
One link that updates itself, instead of twenty messages.
Record what the batch cost
What a run really cost, over the pieces it produced. One button puts that on the products it made.
See what you actually made
Revenue, cost and margin per order. Money in, money out, cash on hand.
Everything it knows is true and silent. A balance six weeks overdue looks the same as one paid yesterday, because a row has no state and a file has no opinion. This is the single most expensive thing about running orders on a sheet, and it does not show up as a problem with the sheet — it shows up as money you collected late, or not at all.
A pasted row breaks a range, a column inserted in the wrong place shifts a reference, a total keeps returning a number that is no longer the sum of anything. Nothing errors. The version you trust and the version that is correct drift apart quietly, and you find out when the bank disagrees.
There is no honest way to give a buyer a view of their own order: sharing the file shows them everyone else, so the answer is a message you write by hand, every time they ask. On an eight-to-sixteen-week build that is roughly twenty messages an order, and it is the work the customer-facing page exists to take off you.
The sheet is at its best with ten orders and one editor. At forty orders, two editors and a workshop invoice arriving mid-build, the same file needs discipline nobody has time for in a busy month — which is when the mistakes cost the most.
$0
Free with a Google account, and that is the honest number to beat. The ready-made trackers people buy are one-off purchases of roughly $8 to $20 on Etsy — one seller's order tracker is $8, marked down from $13, with 28 reviews — and the market for them is big enough that Etsy generates category pages for "track order google sheet".
$29/mo
One plan, per business, everything included. $0 today, first charge after 7 days, cancel in one click. 14-day money-back on the first month. Nothing is metered.
What is in the planWe are not the only answer, and pretending otherwise wastes your afternoon.
The other incumbent: a card per order and the stages on a wall. Free, then $5 a user a month billed annually.
AirtableA database you design yourself. Free to 1,000 records a base, then $20 per user a month billed annually.
Craftybase, now StocksmithMaterials, recipes and cost of goods for makers who hold stock, with lot traceability. From $20 a month, with its real tiers from $83 billed annually.
The whole categorySix families of tool, what each one answers, and the three questions that pick between them.
For the first ten or fifteen, yes — better than most software, because it costs nothing and fits your process exactly. The three things it will not do at any size are warn you that a balance is unpaid, show a customer their own order, and keep its arithmetic honest with more than one editor. When those three start costing money, the sheet has finished its job.
Nothing, if you build it: Sheets is free with a Google account. The ready-made ones sell for roughly $8 to $20 as a one-off — one popular Etsy tracker is $8, down from $13, with 28 reviews. Ordamo is $29 a month, which is the comparison you should make deliberately rather than by accident.
Do, if you are at the start. A good template gives you the columns you would have worked out yourself in an afternoon. What it cannot give you is a system that notices things: the template still needs you to look at it, still shares badly with a customer, and still has formulas that break silently when the business gets busy.
For anything the sheet is genuinely good at — a pricing model, a materials list, a plan for next quarter — yes. Running the same orders in both places is the one thing not to do: two records of what is paid is worse than either one alone.
Export the sheet as CSV and drop it in. There is no template to fill: the columns are read for you whatever they are called, and you confirm what was found before anything saves. Then add the batches currently in production. Keep the old file as an archive rather than deleting it.
They do not need to match anything. The import reads what your header row says and shows you how it mapped before it saves, so "Cliente", "Customer" and "Client name" all land in the same place. What you check is the mapping, not the spelling.
The same answer throughout. Excel is a better calculator than Sheets and shares worse, which changes nothing about the three gaps: no reminder, no order page for the customer, no protection against a formula quietly breaking.
No, and it never will be. A sheet is infinitely flexible and that is exactly why it cannot help you — nothing can be relied upon in a structure that can be anything. What you get in exchange is a model that already knows a deposit has a date, an order has a balance and a batch has a cost.
A spreadsheet, honestly, followed by Trello's free plan if you would rather see stages than sums. Among purpose-built tools Zoho Inventory allows 50 orders a month free and Inventora refers to a free Hobby plan without publishing its limits. Ordamo's free part is a sample workspace with no card; your own orders need the trial.
That Sheets is free with a Google account is Google's own published position. The template prices are from listings and category pages on etsy.com and from one seller's own site, read on 9 September 2026: a tracker at $8 reduced from $13 with 28 reviews, and Etsy's generated pages for "track order google sheet" and "etsy order management". Prices on marketplaces move; treat them as the scale of the market rather than as a quote.
$0 today · first charge after 7 days · cancel in one click
Built for orders that take weeks to deliver