The comparison you are actually making
Your billing spreadsheet works. Here is exactly where it stops.
Almost every commercial subcontractor bills out of a workbook, and that is not a mistake — it is how the company got here. So this page is not an argument that spreadsheets are bad. It is the specific list of what a workbook is genuinely better at, the four places it predictably breaks, and an honest column of reasons to stay on one. Read the staying column first. If you are in it, we would rather you knew now.
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- Most subs start billing in a spreadsheet, and on one job, with one person billing, it is genuinely hard to beat.
- It fails on a schedule you can predict: the first change order, the fifth concurrent job, and the week the person who built it is out.
- SubMark is not a better spreadsheet. It is what stops you keeping four of them in agreement by hand.
Credit where it is due
What a spreadsheet is genuinely better at.
Most of these are things no software gets to claim, including ours. Any system has to be worth more than the whole list, and for a lot of companies it is not yet.
It is already paid for, and everyone already knows it
No seat count, no renewal, no rollout, no training. Your PM, your bookkeeper and the GC’s project accountant all speak it fluently. Any software has to be worth more than that head start, and plenty of software is not.
Infinite flexibility, in ten minutes
A new column because this one owner wants square footage beside the percentage. A one-off formula to answer a partner’s question before lunch. No product roadmap, no support ticket, no waiting. Nothing structured can match a blank grid for answering a question nobody anticipated, and that is a real advantage rather than a consolation.
It is the right tool for modeling
Estimating, a what-if on a bid, a labor projection across three scenarios, a quick sanity check on whether a job pencils at all. That is what a spreadsheet is for, it is excellent at it, and we are not suggesting you stop.
You own the file outright
It sits on your drive. No vendor can change it, price it differently, deprecate a feature you depend on or go out of business. For a company that intends to be here in twenty years, that is not paranoia — it is a reasonable thing to weigh.
On a single job it is simply faster
One job, one schedule of values, one person billing it. There is no setup, no records to connect, and no concept to learn. A workbook will beat any system at that, and it is why almost every sub starts there.
The four failures
A workbook does not degrade gradually. It breaks in four specific places.
None of these is anyone being careless. They are properties of the tool: a grid of values with no idea what the values mean, held in a file that can be copied. Every one of them surfaces late, which is the expensive part.
The first change order
A workbook built against a contract value is correct until the contract value changes. Then a line is edited, a total is not, and the schedule of values stops reconciling to the contract. Nobody notices, because every individual draw still looks right. It surfaces at closeout, when the billed total does not tie and you are reading a year of email to find out which change order was never added.
The retainage formula nobody re-checked
It was right in month one. It has been quietly wrong since month three, usually because a change order line was added without the retainage column being dragged down, or because one line’s rate differs from the rest. The number is wrong by a consistent amount for eleven months, and nobody notices until someone checks it against the contract.
The copy that became the real one
Somebody emails the workbook to get a figure checked. An edit happens in the copy. Now there are two, and the live one is whichever was opened most recently. This is not carelessness — it is what happens when the system of record is a file that can be attached to an email.
The field, which was never in it
A lot of lost money never appears in the workbook at all, because it never got written down. Extra work done on a verbal. A ticket signed and left in a truck. An area completed but not logged, so the percentage you claim has no basis when the GC’s PM disputes it. A spreadsheet cannot be in a parking lot at 4pm.
Everything SubMark does not do, in one place.
A software page that only lists wins is a software page you stop believing in week two. So here are the limits in our own words, before you find them yourself in a trial.
- SubMark does not import your spreadsheet. There is no "upload your workbook" step. You build the schedule of values from your trade’s starting breakdown and edit the lines to match the job — which is usually faster than it sounds, and is the honest answer rather than a feature we are about to announce.
- It is not as flexible as a blank grid, and it never will be. You cannot add an arbitrary column or write your own formula. What you get instead is records that already know about each other, which is the trade you are being asked to make.
- It is not your estimating tool. There is a bid builder for the bid board, but the workbook you price jobs in is yours and should stay yours.
- It is not your accounting system. QuickBooks Online bills and purchases pull into job costing automatically, hourly, if you turn that on; a finished draw pushes back as a QBO invoice with a click, one at a time.
- There is no native field app. It is mobile-first in the browser and built for a thumb, but it is a web app and it needs a connection — your workbook on a laptop does not.
- It does not generate the owner-standard billing documents and it does not submit to your GC. You bill the way that GC requires, exactly as you do now.
- It costs money every month, and the spreadsheet does not. That is the whole decision, so it is on the page.
What you get instead
Records that already know about each other.
That sentence is the entire difference. A workbook holds numbers that mean nothing to each other, so a human keeps them in agreement. Here the schedule of values, the draws, retainage, change orders, tickets, logs and costs are the same job — so agreement is a property of the system instead of somebody’s Sunday night.
One schedule of values, and it stops moving
It locks when the first draw is submitted — not at contract execution, so the whole first cycle is still yours to fix. Approved change orders are added as their own lines automatically, tied back to the change order they came from, which is the single most common thing a workbook gets wrong six months in.
Schedule of values →Drawn, certified and received as three numbers
Because they are three separate events, and one "billed to date" column hides both gaps. Retainage held sits beside them, with the check you should actually expect. A short certification stays visible in the month it happened instead of being quietly reconciled away.
Draw tracking →Every GC’s cutoff in one calendar
Each job carries its GC’s cutoff day, due day, reminder window and submission method. Fifteen jobs and nine GCs is a calendar problem long before it is an arithmetic problem, and it is the part that lives in one person’s head.
How the calendar works →Retainage as a running balance across every job
Held per draw, as dollars, and totaled across everything — including jobs that are otherwise finished, which is exactly where a workbook loses it. "What are we owed in retention" becomes a number you read.
Retainage tracking →The extra work, captured where it happens
Change events logged from the field with photos the day they happen. T&M tags priced off your own rate lists and e-signed on site, with several tags converting into one change order. No spreadsheet takes a signature in a parking lot, and that signature is the whole argument.
Change orders →And the three weeks of the month that are not billing
Daily logs, crew scheduling, the time clock, job costing against budget, the bid board — in the same system, reading the same jobs, with the field free and unlimited.
Everything SubMark does →None of that is a tier you upgrade into. The core modules are on in every trade pack from setup, and the full list is on the product page.
Side by side, including the rows we lose.
Four rows below go to the spreadsheet, because they genuinely do. A comparison table where one column wins everything is marketing, and you have read enough of those to discount it on sight.
| What you need | A spreadsheet | SubMark |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Already paid for | $249/mo for the company, first 3 office users included, $39/mo each after that. Field users free and unlimited. |
| Add a column or a formula nobody anticipated | Yes, in ten minutes — this is what it is for | No. The records are structured. |
| Works with no connection | Yes | No. It is a web app. |
| Modeling a bid or a what-if | Yes, and better than we are | Not what it is for. Keep the workbook. |
| Someone else can bill when the owner of the file is on holiday | In theory. In practice the formulas are undocumented | Yes. The structure is the same on every job, so billing is not a person. |
| A record of who approved a change, and when | Cell edit history, if the file lives in Google Sheets or OneDrive — who typed it, not who approved it | Yes — change orders carry a decision log with who decided, the date, and whether it came back signed. |
| Capture extra work in the field, with the GC’s signature | No | Yes. T&M tags priced off your rate lists, signed on site or by a link. |
| An approved change order reaching the schedule of values | Only if someone remembers to put it there | Automatic, as its own line. |
| Billing deadlines across every GC, with reminders | A separate calendar, maintained by hand | Per job, in one draw calendar. |
| Retainage outstanding across every job, including closed ones | A column in each job’s file, summed by hand | One retainage column across every job, for any period, or filtered to a single job. |
| Reading fifteen jobs at once | Fifteen files, and only some are current | One table. Export it to Excel or PDF when you need to send it. |
| What your foremen cost to put on it | Nothing — they are not on it | Nothing, and they are. Field users are free and unlimited. |
| Daily logs, crew scheduling, time clock, job costing | More files | Same system, same jobs. Hours from the daily labor logs are what job costing reports against; T&M ticket hours are billed, not costed. |
The honest split
Plenty of subs should stay on the spreadsheet.
We would rather tell you that here than take a month of your trial to arrive at it. The left column is real advice, given to people who would otherwise have paid us.
Stay on the spreadsheet if…
- You run one or two jobs at a time and one person bills them. The coordination problem that justifies a system does not exist yet, and buying one early just adds a login.
- Your work is short. A four-week job has no fourteen-month schedule of values, no retainage tail and no change orders approved in month four. The failure modes below are mostly duration problems.
- Billing week is a morning, and nothing is going missing. If you can already answer what you have billed, what was certified and what is still held, across everything, then your process works. Do not replace a working process.
- What you actually need is modeling, not record-keeping. If the question is "does this job pencil at 6% overtime", that is a spreadsheet question and it will stay one.
- You are the only person who will ever touch it, and you are not going anywhere. Worth being honest with yourself about the second half of that sentence.
Move off it if…
- More than one person needs to bill, or needs to answer a question from the file. The moment a second person opens it, the undocumented formulas become everyone’s problem.
- You are running five or more concurrent jobs across several GCs. Different cutoffs, different portals, different backup requirements — that is a calendar and a checklist, not arithmetic, and it is what actually costs you a cycle.
- The money is leaking upstream of billing. Work done on a verbal, the ticket a photo in somebody’s phone, the change order approved in month four and first billed in month seven. No workbook catches that, because the problem is that nothing was written down in the field.
- You cannot answer "what have we billed and not collected, across every job" in under a minute. If that takes opening files, the file is no longer the system — it is a report you rebuild.
- Retainage on closed jobs has become a mystery. It is the most reliably lost money in a sub’s business and it is lost precisely because the job is mentally finished and the tracking lived in that job’s workbook.
- One person is the single point of failure for getting paid. That is the risk nobody prices until the week it lands.
The pattern that works is not a migration. Start new jobs here, let in-flight jobs finish where they started, and keep the workbook for estimating. How the SOV works here →
Questions
Spreadsheets to SubMark: what a sub’s office actually asks.
Can I import my existing billing spreadsheet?
No, and that is worth being straight about because it is the first thing everyone asks. There is no workbook upload. You pick your trade during setup, which loads a starting schedule-of-values breakdown and phase names for that trade, and you edit the lines to match the job. For a job you are mid-way through you also enter what has been billed to date. Most people find it quicker than expected, but it is typing, not importing.
Can I get my data back out?
Yes. The draws report reads across every job or filters to one, for any period, and exports the same table to Excel or PDF — which is also how you send it to a partner or a lender without giving them a login. Timesheets have a payroll summary export, and submittal packages come out as a merged PDF.
Do I have to stop using Excel?
No, and you should not. Keep estimating where you estimate it, keep modeling where you model it, keep the one-off analysis a blank grid is genuinely best at. What moves is the operating record — the schedule of values you bill against for fourteen months, the draws, retainage, change orders, tickets and logs. The thing you stop doing is keeping four copies of the same numbers in agreement by hand.
Is this just a spreadsheet with a login?
Three differences that a grid cannot have. The records know about each other, so an approved change order lands on the schedule of values without anyone remembering. The field is in it, so a T&M tag gets priced in the office and signed on site before the crew leaves. And deadlines are per job across every GC, so the calendar is not in one person’s head. If none of those three is your problem, a spreadsheet with a login is a fair description and you should stay where you are.
What happens to the workbook I have now?
Keep it. It is the record of everything that happened before you switched, and nothing is gained by deleting it. The usual pattern is to start new jobs in SubMark and let in-flight jobs finish in the workbook they started in, rather than re-entering a job that is eleven draws deep. The exception is a long job early in its life, which is worth moving because the retainage and change-order tail is still ahead of it.
My GC wants their own template every month. Does that change?
No. You submit the way each GC requires — their template, their portal, a PDF by email — exactly as you do today. SubMark does not generate the owner-standard billing documents and does not submit on your behalf. What it records is which system that job uses, the cutoff and due dates, and the draw itself against the schedule of values. There is a separate page on that question if it is the one you came with.
Can my foremen use it without me paying per person?
Yes. Field users are free and unlimited, as are the subs you invite to the portal, and that is deliberate rather than promotional — a daily log is only worth having if every foreman actually fills one in, and per-seat pricing is what stops that happening. You pay for office users.
How long before I know whether this is better than my spreadsheet?
Build one real schedule of values on one real job and bill a draw against it. That is the test, it does not need a demo first, and if the structure is not the shape of your billing you will know quickly. Pricing is on the pricing page rather than behind a call, so there is nothing to find out later.
Read next
Schedule of values for subcontractors: how to build one that bills clean
Where to break the lines, where change orders and retainage sit, and the section on what specifically breaks when the schedule of values lives in a workbook.
Every GC bills on a different calendar
Five dates per cycle rather than one, the seven fields to record per GC, and what a single missed cutoff actually costs you — which is a full cycle, not a day.
Billing extra work without a signed change order
The money that never reaches the workbook, because it was done on a verbal and the ticket is a photo in somebody’s phone.
Does SubMark do AIA G702 and G703 billing?
The straight answer is no. What it keeps instead, and when a dedicated billing-document tool is the better buy.
Test it against the workbook, on one real job.
Start the trial, pick your trade during setup, build one schedule of values and bill a draw against it. Then compare that to your Sunday night. Nobody has to sit through a demo first, and the workbook is still there if the answer is no.
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