Spreadsheets got you here. But they're costing you more than you think — in lost quotes, missed deadlines, and hours of manual work every week.
If you're running your fab shop on Excel, you're leaving money on the table every day. Lost quotes. Double-booked machines. Hours spent copy-pasting between spreadsheets. FabFlow replaces all of it with a single platform — and at $99/month, it pays for itself the first time you don't miss a quote because it got buried in your inbox.
Start Free Trial →A typical 15-person fab shop running on spreadsheets loses:
15–25 hours/week
on manual quoting, work order updates, purchase order tracking, and status check-ins. At a shop rate of $100/hr, that's $75,000–$130,000/year in lost productivity. FabFlow's Professional plan costs $2,988/year — a 25x–43x return.
| Capability | FabFlow | Excel |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly Cost | $99–$249 | "Free" (but see above) |
| Quote Creation | Minutes (AI-assisted) | 30–60 min (manual) |
| Quote Tracking | Automatic, searchable | Scattered files, emails |
| Work Orders | Generated from quotes | Manual recreation |
| Purchase Orders | Linked to WOs, tracked | Separate spreadsheet |
| Inventory | Real-time, MTR-linked | Manual counts |
| Shop Floor Status | Live dashboard | "Walk the floor" |
| Job Costing | Automatic | Hours of reconciliation |
| Customer History | One click | Search through folders |
| Team Access | Everyone, real-time | One person at a time |
| Error Rate | Low (automated) | High (manual entry) |
When a customer emails "can you quote this?", how long does it take you to find the drawing, calculate material, estimate labour, check margins, and send the quote? In Excel: 30–60 minutes. In FabFlow: 2 minutes with AI. That 30x speed difference means you quote more jobs, faster — and the first one to quote often wins the work.
Your estimator has one spreadsheet. The shop foreman has a whiteboard. Purchasing has another spreadsheet. Accounting has QuickBooks. None of them talk to each other. When a customer calls asking about WO-15234, you're walking to the shop floor or searching through email. FabFlow gives everyone the same real-time view.
A wrong formula in Excel. A copy-paste error. A missed decimal. In fabrication, these aren't typos — they're parts cut wrong, material ordered to the wrong spec, quotes that lose money. FabFlow automates the calculations so the numbers are always right.
Spreadsheets work at 5 jobs/month. At 50 jobs/month, you're drowning. At 100, you're losing track of work, missing due dates, and frustrating customers. FabFlow scales from your first quote to thousands — same interface, no degradation.
Most shop owners worry about the switch: "I don't have time to learn new software." FabFlow was built for this. Setup takes 5 minutes. The interface is simpler than Excel. And the AI quoting means you're productive on day one — describe a part and get a priced quote immediately. Your team doesn't need training. If they can use a smartphone, they can use FabFlow.
Honestly? Only if you're doing fewer than 5 jobs a month and have no plans to grow. At that volume, spreadsheets work fine. But if you want to quote faster, win more work, stop losing track of jobs, and build a shop that runs without you — the $99/month Starter plan pays for itself on day one.
30-day free trial. Import your existing quotes. No commitment.
Start Free Trial →