Comparison
ACE Platforms vs spreadsheets
The most common system in this trade is not a competitor — it is a spreadsheet, a shared drive and someone's memory. It works longer than software companies like to admit, and then it stops working quite suddenly.
About spreadsheets
Spreadsheets are free, flexible, already installed, and understood by everyone in the building. Any honest comparison has to start there.
Choose spreadsheets if…
Genuinely. If one of these is you, we are not the right answer and a demo would waste your afternoon.
- You are an owner-operator running a handful of jobs a month and holding it in your head. Software would be overhead you do not need yet.
- Your process is still changing every month. A spreadsheet bends; a system has opinions.
- Cash is tight and the spreadsheet is not currently costing you jobs. Do not buy software to feel organised.
Choose ACE Platforms if…
- You cannot say what a job made without an evening of reconciling, and you are no longer sure the answer is right.
- Two people have different versions of the same number and both believe theirs.
- A rep's commission is calculated by hand, and a discount does not change what they earn.
- You are hiring — the spreadsheet lives in one person's head and that person is now a single point of failure.
What ACE Platforms does
- Job costing is first-class: every job carries its real materials, labour, disposal, permits and commission, so gross profit is derived rather than estimated — and the company P&L reconciles to the individual jobs.
- Estimating reads the measurement. Line items carry formulas against measurement fields, so ridge cap reads ridge feet and starter reads eaves plus rakes. Change a measurement and every dependent line updates.
- Commissions recompute themselves as jobs move, get paid or change, with approved entries frozen and reversals as visible negative lines rather than quiet deletions.
- Canvassing captures offline — knocks, notes, GPS and photos — and shows a running count of what is still queued.
- Ventilation is sized properly: attic floor area derived from roof area and pitch rather than from squares, existing intake counted rather than guessed, and a refusal to recommend exhaust that would exceed intake.
- One system end to end, so signing an estimate drafts the invoice, the work order and the material order from the items the customer actually accepted.
What to ask either of us
Take these to every demo you sit through, including ours. The answers separate the products far better than a feature list does.
- Show me a job that made less than expected, and where the money went. Not a report — an actual job.
- Change one measurement and show me every line on the estimate that moves.
- Discount a job by ten percent and show me what happens to the rep's commission.
- Show me the P&L, and then show me that it reconciles to the individual jobs.
- Take a knock in aeroplane mode and show me what the app says is still queued.
- Export everything. If leaving is hard, that is a decision you are making now.
Questions we get asked
- At what point is a spreadsheet actually costing us money?
- Usually at the point where nobody can answer 'what did that job make?' without rebuilding it by hand. That is when discounts stop being visible, commission gets paid on the wrong basis, and the jobs that lose money look like the ones that make it.
- Can we keep using QuickBooks?
- Yes. Purchases and bills pull in as costs and issued invoices push out as invoices, so your accountant keeps working the way they already do.
- Can we import our existing jobs and customers?
- Talk to us about your data before you commit to anything. What imports cleanly depends on what your current system will export, and that is a question worth answering during a demo rather than after a migration.
- How long does it take to get running?
- The setup that matters is your price book, your commission plans and your document templates — those decide whether the numbers are right. We offer private onboarding for teams that would rather have it configured with them than by themselves.
See it against your own jobs.
Bring a job you already finished and one you are quoting. We will run both through it and you can tell us where it falls down.