Carew vs Google Sheets

The short answer

Keep Sheets for shared lists, quick trackers, analysis and anything a team needs to work on together today. Real-time collaboration is its great strength.

Move to a system when the sheet has grown into many tabs held together by formulas or Apps Script, people edit cells they should not, data is pasted in from other tools, or partners need access to their part and nothing else.

Side by side

Area	Carew	Google Sheets
Cost	One fixed price for the build	Included in Google Workspace, and free for personal accounts
Building it	Weeks, with a written plan and one fixed price first	A shared sheet takes minutes. One the business can rely on takes days or weeks of a skilled person's time
Keeping it working	Changes made and tested by the people who built it	Depends on whoever wrote the formulas and Apps Script. Changes go live without testing
Several people at once	Each person sees and edits what their role allows	Real-time editing for everyone with access. Protected ranges help, but most editors can change most cells
Outside partners	Each partner sees only their own records	Sharing is by file, so a partner sees the whole sheet or a separate copy
History	Every change logged with who made it and when	Version history and edit history for each cell
Data from other tools	Imported from Xero, Shopify and others, or from their exports	Add-ons, Apps Script or exports pasted in by hand
On a phone	Built for the phone browser as well as the desktop	The Sheets app, which is awkward for data entry on large sheets
Size	A database built for the job	Large sheets slow down, and each spreadsheet stops at 10 million cells

Google Sheets details are based on Google's documentation and may change.

When Google Sheets is the better choice

For lists, trackers and shared working documents, Sheets is hard to beat. It is quick, costs little or nothing and the whole team can work in it at once. A custom system for that would be money wasted.

When Carew is the better choice

HexClad kept creator data in spreadsheets, alongside ClickUp lists and email threads. Working out who had been sent what, and whether they had posted, meant checking everything by hand.

The system that replaced it holds one record per creator, flags duplicates, sends orders to Fulfil.io automatically and gives each partner agency access to its own creators only.

Questions