The spreadsheet that runs the studio

People assume a studio with a few hundred products runs on software. Ours runs on one spreadsheet with four tabs, and it has outlasted two attempts to replace it.

What is in it

• Filament: every spool, its color, the date it was opened, and whether it has been dried this month.
• Orders: what is printed, what is packed, what is waiting on a reprint.
• Failures: every failed print with the reason. This tab has been the most useful of the four.
• Requests: custom asks and whether we said yes.

Why it still works

Because we can change it in ten seconds. A real inventory system would take a week to add a column, and by then we would have stopped tracking the thing we needed to track. The spreadsheet is not better than software in general — it is better for a studio where the process changes every month.

The right system is the one you will still update on a Friday afternoon.

The failure tab is the one we would defend hardest. Knowing that a specific color fails on a specific printer at a specific temperature is worth more than any inventory count.