Spreadsheets remember formulas. Tradeeze remembers jobs.
Respect where it's due: a good quoting spreadsheet is control, familiarity and zero subscription. You built it, you know every cell, and it's priced thousands of dollars of work. The catch is that it only knows what you keep telling it, and most of us stopped telling it years ago.
The real difference
The template's supplier prices are from whenever you last updated them. The labour numbers are the same guesses you made when you built it. The GST is a formula you hope nobody ever fat-fingers, and every quote starts as a copy of the last one, which is how the wrong client name ends up on page one. There's no acceptance workflow, no record of sign-off, and no cell anywhere for "the last three of these ran an hour over."
Tradeeze keeps what you like about the spreadsheet: your prices, your rates, your rules, your control, with sign-off on every quote. It removes the re-typing, does the GST and the document properly, gives the client a page to accept on, and then does the thing no template can: it checks the quote against reality at close-out and carries the lesson into the next one.
Which one fits you?
Stick with the spreadsheet if
- You quote rarely enough that the admin doesn't hurt
- Your prices and labour assumptions genuinely stay current
- You're happy maintaining formulas, formats and GST yourself
- Emailing a PDF and chasing a yes by phone works for your clients
Move to Tradeeze if
- Quotes eat your evenings and the template needs constant babysitting
- You suspect stale prices and light labour estimates are costing margin
- You want to capture the job on site and have the draft done by the ute
- You want clients accepting online instead of going quiet
- You want every close-out to sharpen the next quote automatically
Side by side, without the noise
| TradeezeThis is us | Excel / Google Sheets | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting a quote | Capture on site: voice, photos, measurements; the draft comes back itemised | Copy last quote, retype, hope nothing rides along |
| Price freshness | Supplier invoices and price lists keep costs current; variance shows up at close-out | As fresh as your last manual update |
| Labour assumptions | Rates by work type, tuned by the hours jobs actually take | Whatever you estimated when you built the sheet |
| GST & the document | Itemised quote with GST, assumptions, exclusions and validity built in | Formulas and formatting you maintain by hand |
| Client acceptance | Hosted quote page with online acceptance | PDF attachment and a follow-up call |
| Outcome learning | Won/lost and actual costs reconciled at close-out feed the next draft | Only if you maintain it all manually, forever |
| Margin guardrails | Thin quotes get flagged before sign-off | The margin is whatever the formula says it is |
Why the difference matters on a real job
Your sheet still prices a hot water swap at 4 hours because that's what you typed in 2023. Since then, half these jobs have been tight-access terraces running closer to 5.25. The spreadsheet can't notice a pattern; it can only repeat one.
In Tradeeze the overruns land in the close-out record, and the next tight-access swap is drafted at 5.25 hours with the margin intact, before you've left the driveway.
Excel and Google Sheets are trademarks of Microsoft and Google respectively; neither is affiliated with Tradeeze. Comparison reflects typical template-based quoting practice as at July 2026.
Bring one job across and compare.
Keep the spreadsheet. Re-quote one past job in Tradeeze and see which number you'd stand behind.