5 Ways Google Sheets Can Transform Your Moving Company

Moving happens on the ground, outside, with customers — all on the go. It doesn’t happen on a desktop computer in a back office. No matter how many or few trucks and jobs your company has every week, you need a practical way to track relevant, real-time information for each move. That means needing a place to list out jobs — complete with customer names, addresses, contact information, the exact truck, the required equipment, the crew… and preferably in orderly columns and rows.

And still, there are thousands of moving companies without sufficient software in place to meet these needs. Some use pencil and paper, some use QuickBooks, and some don’t use anything. But there are also some moving companies that use Google Sheets.

Maybe your moving company already uses Google Sheets or you’re considering switching over to Google Sheets from legacy, on-premises software. We’ve compiled a list of 5 ways you can transform your company’s everyday operations — and the customer experience you provide — using Google Sheets.

Real-time collaboration

The problem with on-premises software like Excel (even the 2016 edition) is that you can’t have more than one person at a time editing a spreadsheet. When multiple people are in an Excel 2016 spreadsheet, only one person can edit at a time, making it impossible to work together in a spreadsheet in real time.

Meanwhile, Excel Online works fine for real-time collaboration… but only if you have an internet connection. Google Sheets works both online and offline. (It saves changes you’ve made offline once you’re back online.)

Google Sheets was born in the cloud, like the rest of Google’s productivity tools, and has always allowed multiple people to work in the same spreadsheet at once. That means fewer redundancies, a single access point for all information, and the ability to work together in real time.

It’s free!

Anyone can use Google Sheets without paying a dime. That means you can run your moving company’s day-to-day operations on a sophisticated, robust platform — powered by Google’s cloud infrastructure — without it costing you an arm and a leg.

Many moving companies using Excel may be stuck with old versions because it costs something to upgrade. And if you buy a new computer and have to buy Microsoft Office again or need multiple people to have access, you can run into problems with Excel’s affordability and accessibility.

No more wasting paper

There’s a lot of wasted paper in the moving industry, and much of it for good reason. When you bill a job, you need to capture a signature, record how long the move took, etc. With tools DocuSign and Google Sheets, you can get away from the waste (and save money on massive amounts of paper).

End-to-end tracking and customization

If you’re going to use spreadsheet software for everything, you might have a row for quotes, how many hours you estimate a job will take, how the customer will pay you… all these different fields that make up an end-to-end move.

It’s easy enough to customize on its own, and you can get free add-ons for Google Sheets that enable you to do even more than you’d think, like pull Salesforce reports directly into spreadsheets, plot your own data onto a Google Map directly from a spreadsheet, and more.

Better experiences for your teams and customers

Moving companies can benefit tremendously from tools that go where they do — tools that are accessible from a smartphone, tablet, laptop, etc. By moving from more manual processes to cloud-based tools like Google Sheets, you can give your team the same great experience your customers have come to expect from consumer apps. There’s no excuse for outdated or nonexistent technology when you have a free, collaborative tool that only takes minutes to set up.

Best of all, cloud-based tools that make transactions and tracking simpler enable your team to give your customers a more streamlined, modern experience.