Comparison
SpoilStack vs Spreadsheets
Most excavation contractors I talk to track jobs in Excel or Google Sheets. It's free, everyone knows how to use it, and it gets you started. So why switch?
The spreadsheet problem
Your foreman isn't going to open Excel on his phone at a dirt site. So the spreadsheet lives on your laptop at the office, and by Thursday it's out of date.
Then the trucker says 16 loads. Your foreman's paper tally says 14. You look at the spreadsheet. Someone typed "14" in a cell at some point. No timestamp. No idea who typed it. Good luck in that argument.
Meanwhile your CAT 330 moved from Henderson to Maple St at 2 PM and nobody updated the sheet. Photos of the work your guys did are sitting in three different phone camera rolls. Rain is coming Thursday and you have to call everyone to tell them.
That's the spreadsheet. It works great until you have more than one person needing to update it from the field.
What we do different
| Feature | Spreadsheet | SpoilStack |
|---|---|---|
| Timestamped haul counts | Manual entry | One tap per load |
| Works offline | Google Sheets needs signal | Full offline |
| Photos attached to jobs | No | From phone camera |
| Machine location | Manual, always stale | One tap to reassign |
| Weather per job site | No | 5-day forecast |
| Morning briefing email | No | 6 AM, weekdays |
| Cost | Free | $99/mo, unlimited users |
"Free" is never free
Spreadsheets are free. One disputed trucking invoice where you can't prove the haul count costs more than a year of SpoilStack. Sunday nights spent reconstructing the week from texts and scraps of paper aren't free either.
$99/month flat. Whole crew. 14 days free to try it.