If you are picking between the two for a shop floor, the short answer is: start in Google Sheets, and move to something like Airtable the moment more than one person is typing into it during a shift. Sheets is a great place to start and a bad place to stay.
I know because I watched a coatings shop go through exactly that.
What actually goes wrong with a spreadsheet?
Not what people expect. It isn’t that the spreadsheet is too small, or too slow, or missing a feature. It’s that a spreadsheet is one big shared grid, and a shop floor is a lot of people touching it at the same time.
Think of a whiteboard in a busy kitchen. One person writing on it is fine. Four people writing on it, with a couple of them standing where they can’t see what the others wrote, and you get the same mess every time: something gets written over, and nobody is sure which version is right.
A database doesn’t work like a whiteboard. It stores one record at a time, and it knows who changed what. That’s the whole difference. Everything else people argue about — views, colours, automations — is a distant second.
So what did the shop actually do?
Three steps, and I think the order matters more than the tools.
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<text x="318" y="52" text-anchor="middle" font-weight="700" fill="#0a2f38">Android app</text>
<text x="318" y="74" text-anchor="middle" fill="#0a2f38" opacity=".75">data moves to Airtable</text>
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<text x="540" y="52" text-anchor="middle" font-weight="700" fill="#0a2f38">Web app</text>
<text x="540" y="74" text-anchor="middle" fill="#0a2f38" opacity=".75">same Airtable data</text>
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<text x="430" y="163" text-anchor="middle" fill="#146273" font-weight="700">Airtable stayed put through both apps</text>
</g>It started in Google Sheets. Then came an Android app for the tablets, and that is when the data moved out of Sheets and into Airtable. Later we decided a web app was the better fit than an app-store app, so the Android app went away — and Airtable stayed exactly where it was.
That last part is the useful bit. Airtable was never a replacement for the app. It was the floor underneath it, and it survived the app being rebuilt.
Which one should I pick, then?
Answer one question: during a shift, is anyone typing into this, or are they only reading it?
| Google Sheets | A database like Airtable | |
|---|---|---|
| A list you read | Good. Stop here. | Overkill. |
| One person updates it daily | Fine. | Not yet worth it. |
| Several people type during a shift | Risky — edits land on top of each other | This is what it’s for |
| You want an app on top later | You’ll be moving the data first | The app can be built straight onto it |
Most small businesses I talk to are in the first two rows and should not be buying anything. The shops in the bottom two rows usually already know something is wrong; they just describe it as “the sheet keeps getting messed up”.
Is the spreadsheet wasted work?
No, and I’d say the opposite. When I started with the coatings shop, their spreadsheet was the specification. Every column in it was a decision someone had already made about how the shop runs. Nobody had to sit in a room and imagine requirements — the requirements had been in daily use for years.
If you’re worried you’re doing it wrong by starting in a spreadsheet, you aren’t. You’re writing the spec by hand, for free, while you find out what you actually need.
What I’d tell you to do
- If nobody types into it during a shift, keep the spreadsheet. Seriously.
- If people do, move the data to a real database before you build anything on top of it.
- Keep the data separate from whatever the crew taps on. The tablet app is the part most likely to get replaced.
If you’re in the bottom two rows of that table, see what a build like this costs or try the demo of a shop-floor app.