I recently had a friend ask me to help him put together a simple work order system for his property management business.
They were doing everything through emails and realized they needed a little bit more, but weren’t quite ready to shell out a lot of money for a full-featured SaaS work order system.
His employees had a lot of familiarity using Google Sheets for other things, so they had made a spreadsheet to track them all. But they wanted to do a bit more, including sending some automated emails and having an interface that made it easy for the workers in the field to quickly see the tasks assigned to them.
I hadn’t really used Google Apps Script before, and I’ve needed to do some more writing/real world testing with the new Gutenberg editor we’re working on, so I figured this would be a good opportunity to write some posts about things I learned along the way.
I’ll publish a new post in this series each day this week:
- Some Useful Reusable Functions in Google Sheets Scripts
- Setting Unique IDs on Rows in Google Sheets
- Set Google Forms Dropdown Options From a Sheets Column
- Getting Google Sheets Rows as Javascript Objects
This is exactly what I’m trying to do as well for my company. This gives me hope, although I’m really new at this stuff so if possible, please share! At least one person will be keeping up with your updates! 😀
Ah, I forgot to publish the other posts! I have the others mostly written, just forgot to schedule them. I’ll post soon!
Checking to see if you have published the other posts? Please do! You have found another follower in need of this exact thing!!
William, have you posted any other details? I am interested in seeing your work order system. Thanks!
Sorry I never did end up publishing these. I’m bad about finishing up posts I write and actually getting them published. I have a couple more posts drafted, just need to clean them up a bit. I’ll try to get those finished up soon.
There are definitely some limitations to using Google Sheets for this role (including scaling for large numbers of tasks), but it does ok as a stop-gap for a simple setup.