"Excel is free." That's the entire business case for spreadsheet maintenance tracking, and it survives only because the real costs land in places nobody measures. Let's measure them, with a worked example: a six-engineer Australian service team on award-adjacent charge-out economics.
Someone maintains the sheet: entering jobs, updating due dates, chasing engineers for what parts they used, reconciling versions. Teams we talk to average 4–8 hours a week of coordinator time on spreadsheet upkeep across scheduling, stock and records. Call it 6 hours at a loaded $65/hour: ~$20,000/year of pure administration that a CMMS does as a by-product of normal use.
Spreadsheets don't chase anyone. Miss one calibration on a client's critical instrument and the cost ranges from an awkward conversation to losing the contract; miss a PM and you buy a breakdown at emergency rates. Even one avoidable breakdown a quarter — conservatively $2,500 each in labour, parts urgency and downtime goodwill — is $10,000/year. Most teams running on memory miss more than that.
No live van stock means engineers arrive without parts. If just one job a week needs a second visit (two hours travel+labour at $130/hr charge-out you can't bill twice): ~$13,500/year, before the client-experience damage. The mechanics are covered in our van stock guide.
Every audit, tender and warranty dispute becomes archaeology: days reconstructing history from folders and inboxes. Two audit/tender events a year at three days each: ~$3,000–5,000 — plus the tenders you don't win because your service-history evidence looks thin next to a competitor's one-click export.
The sheet works because one person keeps it alive in their head. When they leave, so does the system. This cost is invisible right up until it's enormous — and it's the one owners consistently tell us they underestimated.
Tallying the measurable items: roughly $45,000–50,000 a year in admin, rework and misses for our six-engineer example. A CMMS for that team runs $5,000–9,000/year (ServMate's Field plan: 6 users × $69/month ≈ $4,968/year) plus honest setup effort measured in days. Even if our estimates are twice too pessimistic, the spreadsheet loses by multiples — "free" is the most expensive tool in the workshop.
Don't migrate the mess — use the move to clean it. Export your asset list, fix the naming, bin the dead rows, and load a clean register. Our guide to what a CMMS does covers the pieces; a 30-minute demo with your actual spreadsheet is the fastest way to see the difference on your own data.
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