An Excel alternative for site tracking

An Excel alternative for site tracking

Almost everyone starts the same way: an Excel sheet to track the snagging, the defects, the progress. One column for the room, another for the problem, another for the status. It works… for a while.

Then Friday comes and it’s time to update it. Which photo went with which row? Was the crack in the “north wall” this one or the other one? Is this version the latest, or is there a newer one in someone’s inbox? And the sheet, which started out clean, ends up a puzzle only you can solve.

This page isn’t anti-Excel. Excel is a tremendous tool. It’s about what changes when site tracking stops living in a spreadsheet and becomes anchored to the plan.

Why almost everyone starts with Excel

There are good reasons, and they’re worth acknowledging:

• You already have it. Nothing to buy, nothing new to learn.
• It’s flexible. You set up whatever columns you want.
• It’s familiar. Everyone knows how to open a sheet.

For budgets, measurements, and numbers, Excel is hard to beat. The problem isn’t Excel as a spreadsheet. It starts when you use it to track field work, because it wasn’t designed for the site.

Where Excel breaks down on site

These are the points where the sheet fails you — and you’ll certainly recognise them:

• It isn’t tied to the plan. A row that says “crack in north wall” doesn’t show you where it is. You know today; two weeks from now, you don’t.
• The photos live elsewhere. You end up with a camera roll on one side and a sheet on the other, trying to remember which image goes with which row.
• It isn’t built for the phone. Editing cells on your phone, with gloves on and in a hurry in the middle of the site, is torture. So you leave it for the office, and fill it in from memory.
• Version chaos. “snagging_v3_FINAL_definitive.xlsx”. Who has the latest? Yours or the foreman’s?
• It doesn’t alert anyone. A new row doesn’t notify the person who has to act. You have to tell them separately, over WhatsApp.
• It can be edited silently. Anyone with the sheet can change or delete a row without a trace. In a dispute, that doesn’t cover you.

None of this is Excel’s fault. You’re asking it for something it wasn’t built for.

What changes with PinMy

The underlying change is simple: instead of a row in a sheet, every issue is a pin nailed to the exact point on the plan, with its photo, its voice note, and its date.

• You document in the moment, from your phone. Tap the point, speak the issue, keep walking. No filling in the sheet at night from memory.
• Everything is tied to the plan. The crack isn’t an ambiguous row: it’s a pin in the exact corner, with a rectangle showing its extent.
• One source, always current. No stray versions. You and your team see the same plan with the same pins, instantly.
• It gets assigned and followed. Each issue is assigned to whoever it belongs to and moves from “to do” to “done” on the Kanban board. Goodbye to rewriting the status every Friday.
• It alerts on its own. With @mentions, whoever has to act gets the notification. No separate heads-up needed.

Let’s be clear: Excel still has its place

PinMy doesn’t replace Excel for the numbers. Budgets, measurements, cost control — that’s still spreadsheet territory, and rightly so.

What PinMy replaces is using Excel as a field record: the snagging lists, the defect logs, the issue tracking. That’s what improves when it moves from Excel to the plan. Many teams keep their sheet for the financials and move only the site tracking to PinMy.

What you can do today

Only features that are on the phone right now:

• Voice, photo, video, and text pins on PDF plans and site photos.
• Resizable area highlighting to mark the extent of the problem.
• Kanban flow: assign, follow from “to do” to “done”, and close — with @mentions and notifications.
• Voice notes transcribed in 20+ languages, ready to search and copy.
• Dispute-proof pins: only the person who creates a pin can move or delete it.
• Guest mode for subcontractors with no account.
• iOS, Android, web, and a Chrome extension. Hosted in the EU, GDPR-compliant.

Start with one list

No need to migrate anything. Take the next snagging list you were going to keep in Excel and do it in PinMy, on the plan. Compare how much time you save by not reconstructing from memory or wrestling with versions.

It’s free to start, no card and no setup. Also see how to document snagging walks step by step, or how it fits the day-to-day of site supervisors and site managers.

Try it free · Book a 20-minute demo