Trace vs. spreadsheets: what a deal file needs
Nobody sits down and decides to adopt a spreadsheet for their deal files. It's just what's already open — a row per property, a shared drive folder per deal, a naming convention only you fully understand. It costs nothing, everyone on the team already knows how to use it, and for a while it's genuinely enough. This page is about the point where it stops being enough, and why that point arrives quieter than you'd expect.
What a spreadsheet is actually good at
Tracking a pipeline. A row per deal, a column per stage, filter and sort however you like, no login for anyone else to remember. If the job is "which deals are active and what stage are they at," a spreadsheet does that job well, and building something bespoke to replace it would be solving a problem you don't have.
What it has no idea about
The spreadsheet doesn't know what's in the building and pest report sitting in the shared drive folder next to it. It can't tell you the strata report you read in June says the sinking fund is healthy and the AGM minutes from August say otherwise — that comparison only happens if a person happens to reread both and notices. It has no concept of who's allowed to see which file, so "send the solicitor everything" usually means exactly that, whether or not everything is what they should see. And a shared drive's version history tells you a file changed. It doesn't tell you who decided the finding inside it was resolved, or when, or why.
A spreadsheet can hold a document. It has no idea what's in it, or whether the file next to it disagrees.
The two-minute version
Scorecard
| Category | Spreadsheet + shared drive | Trace |
|---|---|---|
| Cost to start | Free — already have it | Not what this page is about |
| Familiar to everyone on day one | Yes, no onboarding | New tool, new habit |
| Fully customisable to your own workflow | Any layout you want | Structured to a deal |
| Knows what's inside a document | No — it just stores the file | Read in full, findings cited to the page |
| Flags when two documents disagree | Only if someone happens to notice | Checked automatically, every time |
| Who can see what | Whatever the folder permissions happen to be | Scoped per party — client, broker, solicitor, inspector |
| Tamper-evident record of who changed what, when | Version history at best | Every check attributed and timestamped |
| Retrieval a year later, deal-specific | Depends who still remembers the folder structure | Still on the deal, found in seconds |
This isn't an argument that spreadsheets are bad — they're not, and for pure pipeline tracking a lot of agencies will keep one regardless. It's that a spreadsheet was never built to understand a deal's evidence, only to list it, and the gap between those two jobs is exactly where a missed finding or an unanswerable "did we check that" comes from.
To be specific about what Trace actually does here: it reads every document in full, cites findings to the page they came from, and keeps a tamper-evident trail of who confirmed what and when — attached to the deal, not floating in a folder named after the property address. What it doesn't do is replace a CRM's pipeline view. See what a CRM does and doesn't cover on the same deal.
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This page is general information, not legal or compliance advice. Confirm your own record-keeping obligations with a qualified adviser before relying on anything here.