Comparison · The spreadsheet stack
Your spreadsheet built this company.
Our founder ran his appraisal firm on an Excel log, a Trello board, QuickBooks, and sticky notes for years. This page is the honest comparison he wishes he'd read sooner — including the cases where the spreadsheet actually wins.
No card to join · First access this summer · Import your spreadsheet in about 15 minutes.
Process
Pending
2Leads — drag onto a stage to convert →
5540 Copper Ridge Dr
Colorado Springs, CO
128 Aspen Grove Ln
Monument, CO
Research & File Creation
24127 Maple Ridge Dr
Colorado Springs, CO
892 Birchwood Ln
Monument, CO
Pick Comps
39820 Antelope Ridge Dr
Falcon, CO
215 Sycamore St
Colorado Springs, CO
3608 Eastwood Ct
Fountain, CO
Before Inspection
37715 Oak Hollow Rd
Peyton, CO
1208 Cedar Park Way
Colorado Springs, CO
5031 Highland Pl
Manitou Springs, CO
After Inspection
29624 Willow Creek Dr
Colorado Springs, CO
418 Magnolia Ave
Monument, CO
Finals
32240 Riverbend Ln
Colorado Springs, CO
1576 Pinehurst Dr
Falcon, CO
830 Brookside Blvd
Colorado Springs, CO
Revisions
26011 Stonegate Cir
Security-Widefield, CO
337 Hawthorne Ct
Colorado Springs, CO
Credit where it's due
What the spreadsheet does well.
If these were nothing, nobody would run a six-figure practice on one. Plenty do.
Basically free.
Excel or Google Sheets is already on your machine. No new subscription, no procurement decision, no sales call. That's a real advantage and we won't pretend otherwise.Infinitely flexible.
Your columns, your color coding, your rules. Nobody's data model tells you how to run your business. Twenty years of muscle memory counts for something.You own it completely.
A file on your drive can't raise prices, get acquired, or shut down. Fair point — which is why our answer to lock-in is CSV export anytime and files in your own cloud storage, not a proprietary vault.
Where it breaks
Six ways the stack quietly taxes you.
None of these show up on an invoice. All of them show up in your evenings.
Nothing reminds you.
The spreadsheet doesn't know the 1004D is due Thursday. It doesn't nag you about the unpaid invoice from March. Every deadline lives in your head or in a second system you also maintain by hand.One person can see it.
The moment you add an assistant, the spreadsheet becomes a bottleneck. Who has the file open? Which version is current? What's actually in progress right now? You become the office's status API.Everything is entered twice.
The order goes in the spreadsheet, then the calendar, then the invoice template, then QuickBooks. Four entries, four chances for a typo, and none of them talk to each other.Getting paid is a side quest.
Invoices are PDFs you build by hand and chase by memory. There's no card checkout, no automatic match between a payment and an appraisal, no receivables view that's current without an hour of reconciliation.Year-end is archaeology.
How many appraisals did you do for each AMC? Average fee by assignment type? Revenue by month? The data is in there — somewhere — and every January you pay for the spreadsheet's flexibility with a weekend of pivot tables.It doesn't scale with a good year.
The system that handled 15 orders a month quietly falls apart at 40. More rows, more tabs, more sticky notes on the monitor — busy season is exactly when the wheels come off.
Side by side
The spreadsheet stack vs. Appraisal Ally.
We gave the spreadsheet its wins. It has real ones.
| Feature | Spreadsheet + duct tape | Appraisal Ally |
|---|---|---|
| Daily operations | ||
| One entry creates the job, the invoice, and the calendar event | Four systems, four entries | |
| Kanban board the whole office can see, live | ||
| Inspection scheduling with Google Calendar sync | Manual, in a second tool | |
| Deadline and revision tracking with notifications | Your memory | |
| Money | ||
| Invoices generated from the appraisal record | Hand-built PDFs | |
| Card payments through a client portalStripe Connect — funds settle into your own account, allocated to the right appraisal automatically. | PRO and MAX | |
| Ancillary invoices for testimony, consults, and rush fees | Square or a hand-made Stripe invoice | Itemized, tied to the case, paid in the portal |
| Receivables view that's current without reconciliation | ||
| Team | ||
| Assistants with scoped visibilityPair an assistant to one appraiser and they see only that appraiser's work; unpaired assistants see everything. | Emailing the file around | |
| Works when two people edit at once | Version-conflict roulette | |
| Year-end | ||
| Revenue, volume, and fee analytics by client, AMC, and month | A weekend of pivot tables | Built in (PRO and MAX) |
| Ownership | ||
| Your data exportable as CSV, anytimeThe spreadsheet's best feature — so we kept it. Leaving is always allowed. | ||
| Files in your own Dropbox or Google Drive | Wherever you put them | |
| Cost | ||
| SubscriptionThe spreadsheet wins on sticker price. The question is what the hours cost. | $0 | From $49 / month |
Showing
Appraisal Ally
- One entry creates the job, the invoice, and the calendar event
- Kanban board the whole office can see, live
- Inspection scheduling with Google Calendar sync
- Deadline and revision tracking with notifications
- Invoices generated from the appraisal record
- Card payments through a client portalStripe Connect — funds settle into your own account, allocated to the right appraisal automatically.
- PRO and MAX
- Ancillary invoices for testimony, consults, and rush fees
- Itemized, tied to the case, paid in the portal
- Receivables view that's current without reconciliation
- Assistants with scoped visibilityPair an assistant to one appraiser and they see only that appraiser's work; unpaired assistants see everything.
- Works when two people edit at once
- Revenue, volume, and fee analytics by client, AMC, and month
- Built in (PRO and MAX)
- Your data exportable as CSV, anytimeThe spreadsheet's best feature — so we kept it. Leaving is always allowed.
- Files in your own Dropbox or Google Drive
- SubscriptionThe spreadsheet wins on sticker price. The question is what the hours cost.
- From $49 / month
Daily operations
Money
Team
Year-end
Ownership
Cost
"Spreadsheet + duct tape" = the typical Excel or Google Sheets log plus separate calendar, invoicing, and status tools, kept in sync by hand. Your stack may vary; the hours usually don't.
The move
One CSV. About 15 minutes. Self-serve.
Export your log, drop it in the import wizard, review the auto-suggested column mapping, done. Clients and AMCs are created automatically, and invoices can be generated from your fee column. Keep the spreadsheet as a backup for as long as you like — we'll never make leaving hard, because CSV export works in both directions.
Keep the discipline. Lose the duct tape.
14-day free trial when we open. No card to join. Import your spreadsheet in about 15 minutes.