Moving off spreadsheets and WhatsApp
This is what most of our customers were running before us. Not a rival product: a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group, a shared drive of photos, and an accountant. It works, right up until it does not.
What you are actually running today
A stock list in a spreadsheet that one person maintains. Photos on a phone and in a shared drive. Enquiries in a WhatsApp group, a shared mailbox and somebody's own mobile. Prices agreed in the yard and written down afterwards, or not. Month end handled by an accountant working from what you send them. None of that is stupid. It is what you build when the business grows faster than the admin, and it is genuinely the cheapest system in the world until the day two people quote the same machine.
Side by side
Rows marked “they win” are the ones where the honest answer is that the other option does it and we do not. A comparison without any is not a comparison.
| What a dealer asks | Spreadsheet and WhatsApp | Stalmio |
|---|---|---|
| Where the stock list lives | One spreadsheet, maintained by one person, and usually a week behind the yard. | One record per machine that the website, the pipeline and the reports all read, so there is nothing to keep in step. |
| What a machine really cost you | Recoverable, but it means finding the purchase, the transport and the prep and adding them up again. | Purchase, transport and workshop costs attach to the machine as they happen, so the margin is there when you need it. |
| Enquiries that arrive out of hours | A WhatsApp message, a shared mailbox, or somebody's own mobile. Whichever caught it owns it. | Lands as a lead with the machine attached and the customer's own words, on a timeline the whole team can see. |
| What buyers see | A site somebody built once, showing machines that sold months ago. | Your own storefront reading your real stock, so it is current because it is the same data. |
| Knowing who owes you | A second spreadsheet, or asking the accountant. | Bills created from the job or hire period they belong to, with one-click reminders that log themselves. |
| Workshop hours and parts | A paper card, a whiteboard, and Friday afternoon. | Work orders with the estimate against the actual while the job is open, and parts that leave the shelf onto the job. |
| Getting startedThey win | It already exists. Everyone can already use it. It costs nothing and needs no training. | There is a subscription, a setup, and somebody has to load your stock in once. That is a real cost and it is the reason to wait until the spreadsheet is genuinely hurting. |
When the spreadsheet is the better answer
If you hold five machines, sell a handful a year and do it all yourself, a spreadsheet is not your problem and software will not make you money. Come back when you are holding thirty, or when the second person joins and you notice you are the only one who knows where anything is.
What moving actually looks like
This is the migration we are actually built for. Stock can be pulled in from your existing website, photos harvested from a listing page rather than re-shot, columns from your spreadsheet mapped across with AI doing the first pass, and specs filled in from a pasted spec sheet. What it costs you is an afternoon of decisions rather than a fortnight of typing, and we do it with you rather than sending you a template.
Questions we get asked
- We have eleven years of history in this spreadsheet. Does it come across?
- The stock does, with its costs and its photos. Eleven years of sold history usually does not come across in full and usually does not need to: what people actually want from it is what a machine of that type made them, and that starts accumulating from day one. Ask us about your specific file rather than assuming either way.
- Will my team actually use it?
- That is the real risk and it is worth naming. The honest answer is that a team adopts the parts that remove work for them and quietly ignores the rest, which is why onboarding turns modules on one at a time rather than everything at once.
- What if it does not work out?
- Your data is yours and comes out again. The bigger practical safeguard is that you do not have to move everything at once: plenty of dealers start with stock and their website, keep the spreadsheet running alongside for a month, and stop maintaining it when they notice they have not opened it.
Bring your own numbers
The fastest way to settle a comparison is to put your own stock and your own week in front of it. That is what a demo is for.