Excel vs Custom Software for Quoting: An Honest Comparison

I’m going to start with something you don’t hear often from a software company: Excel might be exactly what you need.

Seriously. If your quoting process is working, your team isn’t drowning in spreadsheet chaos, and you’re not losing money to errors — keep using Excel. It’s free (ish), your team already knows it, and “if it ain’t broke” is genuinely good engineering advice.

But if you’re reading this article, something is probably starting to crack. So let’s walk through an honest comparison and help you figure out which side of the line you’re on.

When Excel Is Genuinely Fine

Excel handles quoting well when your business meets most of these criteria:

• Small team — one to three people creating quotes
• Simple pricing — flat rates, straightforward per-unit costs, maybe a basic markup
• Low volume — fewer than 20-30 quotes per week
• No approval workflow — whoever creates the quote can send it
• Standalone process — quotes don’t need to automatically feed into invoicing, project management, or inventory

If that describes your business, an Excel quoting template is the right call. Invest an afternoon setting it up properly (data validation, named ranges, protected formulas) and you’ll have a solid system that costs nothing to maintain.

When Excel Starts Costing You Money

The shift doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a slow accumulation of friction, workarounds, and quiet errors. Here’s what typically pushes businesses past the Excel threshold:

Complex Pricing Rules

Your pricing isn’t a simple lookup anymore. You’ve got:

• Quantity-based tier pricing (1-10 units at $X, 11-50 at $Y, 50+ at $Z)
• Customer-specific agreements and contracted rates
• Bundle discounts that interact with each other
• Material costs that fluctuate weekly or monthly
• Labour rates that vary by job type, location, or certification level

In Excel, each new pricing rule adds another layer of formula complexity. After a while, the pricing logic becomes so tangled that only one person understands it — and even they aren’t entirely confident.

Team Size and Workflow

When your quoting process involves multiple people — a sales rep scoping the job, an estimator pricing it, a manager approving it — Excel falls apart. There’s no built-in concept of “this quote is awaiting approval” or “send this back to the estimator with notes.” Teams end up using email threads, sticky notes, or verbal hand-offs to manage workflow that should be systematic.

Integration Needs

Modern businesses don’t operate in silos. Your quote needs to connect to:

• CRM — so you know which client this is for, their history, their credit terms
• Accounting — so an accepted quote becomes an invoice without re-typing everything
• Inventory/purchasing — so you know if you can actually deliver what you’re quoting
• Project management — so the ops team knows what’s coming down the pipeline

Excel doesn’t integrate with anything natively. You end up copying and pasting between systems, which means double handling, data entry errors, and wasted hours.

Speed Requirements

If you’re in a competitive market where the first quote in wins the job, turnaround time matters. A well-built custom quoting tool can generate a quote in minutes — pulling in customer details from your CRM, applying the right pricing automatically, generating a branded PDF, and emailing it to the client. All from a single screen.

In Excel, the same process involves opening the right template, looking up the customer details, manually selecting products, checking pricing is current, exporting to PDF, and attaching it to an email. It works, but it’s slower. At scale, that speed difference is the difference between winning and losing work.

The Comparison, Laid Out

Notice I didn’t label those “Weaknesses” and “Strengths.” Both sides have genuine advantages. The question isn’t which is objectively better — it’s which fits where your business is right now.

The In-Between Options

It’s not a binary choice. There’s a spectrum:

1. Better Excel — Clean up your existing spreadsheets. Add data validation, protect formulas, use structured tables, create a proper template. This is free and often buys you another 6-12 months.

2. Google Sheets — Gets you real-time collaboration and basic version history. Still a spreadsheet with all the formula limitations, but solves the “who has the latest version” problem.

3. Off-the-shelf quoting software — Tools like Quotient, PandaDoc, or HubSpot’s quoting features. Good for standard workflows, but you’ll need to adapt your process to fit the tool rather than the other way around.

4. Low-code platforms — Airtable, SmartSuite, or similar. More flexible than off-the-shelf, less investment than full custom. Works well if your pricing logic isn’t too complex.

5. Custom-built software — A tool designed specifically for your business, your pricing, your workflow. The most expensive option upfront, but the lowest friction long-term for complex operations.

How to Decide

Here’s a quick self-assessment. Score yourself honestly:

• How many people create or edit quotes? Under 3 = Excel is fine. 3-10 = consider shared tools. Over 10 = you need a proper system.
• How many pricing rules do you have? Under 5 = simple. 5-15 = getting complex. Over 15 = Excel is a liability.
• How many quotes per week? Under 20 = manageable. 20-100 = efficiency matters. Over 100 = you need automation.
• Do quotes need approval before sending? No = Excel works. Yes = you need workflow.
• Does quote data need to flow into other systems? No = standalone is fine. Yes = integration saves hours.

If you’re scoring toward the low end on most of these, invest your time in building a great Excel template. If you’re scoring toward the high end on three or more, it’s worth having a conversation about what a purpose-built system looks like.

The Bottom Line

Excel is the greatest general-purpose business tool ever created. It just isn’t a quoting platform, a CRM, or a workflow engine — even though millions of businesses use it as all three.

The right time to move on isn’t when Excel can’t do something. It’s when making Excel do that thing costs more in time, errors, and frustration than the alternative. For some businesses that’s at $2M in revenue. For others it’s at $20M. There’s no universal answer.

What matters is making the decision deliberately, based on your actual pain points — not because someone told you spreadsheets are bad or because a software vendor scared you into buying something you don’t need yet.