When does Excel stop being enough?
Not in the first month. For one person on one PC a spreadsheet is perfect: fast, free, familiar. Three signs you have outgrown it:
- There are two versions. The office one and the shop-floor one, or last year's and this year's. Nobody knows which is real.
- The customer calls. Because they cannot see the spreadsheet, and never could.
- Someone knows it by heart. Where the tyres are, what the Golf had last year, how many brake pads are left. While that person is around it works; on holiday or after they leave, it does not.
Spreadsheet or garage software — honestly
| Aspect | Excel / paper | Mechano |
|---|---|---|
| Who sees it? | Whoever sits in front of the PC or holds the paper | Front desk, shop floor and owner see the same — on a phone too |
| Several people at once | Two versions, merging by hand | One sheet; every change reaches everyone instantly |
| The customer | Calls | Follows the work order on a link, gets an email on status changes |
| History | Searching files, if they still exist | Every earlier work order by registration, even after the car changes owner |
| Stock | Found out at stocktake | A part on a work order reduces stock instantly; alerts below minimum |
| Tyre hotel | A label and a row in the sheet | Shelf found by registration; release with a date and history |
| Invoicing | Retyping into the invoicing tool | One click from the work order, from your own invoicing account |
| Permissions | Everyone sees everything, or nobody sees anything | Mechanic, office, administrator — who sees and does what |
| Backups | If someone remembers | Daily, automatically; an encrypted copy kept elsewhere |
| Price | Free — the time spent on it is not | A monthly fee per plan with unlimited users; see Pricing |
Where the spreadsheet wins: you can type anything into any column. The system, in return, tells you what is worth recording — and you never have to reinvent that again.
How the switch happens
Sign-up, location, staff
A few minutes. After adding the location and the staff, everyone logs in with their own role — the mechanic on a phone, the office on a PC.
Importing existing data
Customers, vehicles, stock, tyre hotel: send the spreadsheet and we help. Whatever is not in a spreadsheet gets added as customers arrive in the first weeks — the history builds from there.
The first work order
Registration, customer, job — done. The second is faster because the vehicle is already there. After a week nobody opens the old spreadsheet.
What runs by itself
Customer notifications on status changes, a follow-up email after closing, weekly and monthly summaries for the owner, a backup every night. Nobody did these in Excel — there was nobody to do them.
Not everything at once
Many workshops start with work orders and switch on inventory or the tyre hotel later. The modules share one system, but you do not have to use them all on day one.
What Mechano does not do
It does not run your old installed program and does not read arbitrary legacy database formats — spreadsheets, yes. It does not work without the internet: that is the price of the cloud, where the shop floor and the office always see the same thing. And it does not replace a good mechanic — it just lets them deal with the car instead of the paperwork.