Trackords vs Spreadsheets for Expiry Tracking

Side-by-side

Spreadsheet vs Trackords at a glance

Capability	Spreadsheet (Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers)	Trackords
Price	Free (or already included with your suite)	Free, no credit card
Email reminders before expiry	Manual — needs Apps Script or a Power Automate flow	Built-in. 35, 10 and 5 days before each expiry + critical alert on expiry day, automatically
Reminder recipients	Single recipient at best	Owner + creator + picked reminder user + all admins
Multi-user editing	Yes (Google Sheets) / risky (Excel locking)	Yes, with three roles: admin, editor, viewer
Per-user role permissions	Sheet-level only	Row-level isolation by account; role-based access enforced server-side
File attachments per row	Awkward — links to Drive only	Native, encrypted, stored outside web root
Audit log (who changed what)	Limited revision history	Immutable audit log with actor, IP, timestamp, before/after
Filter by record type	Manual filters	Built-in type slicers (Insurance, Contract, Iqama, License, custom)
Sort by next renewal	Manual sort	Default sort, plus urgency colour coding
Dashboard / overview	Make your own	Pre-built dashboard with widgets
CSV import / export	Native	Native, plus validation per row on import
Mobile friendly	Yes (Google Sheets); painful (Excel desktop)	Yes, with mobile drawer navigation
Onboarding for new teammates	They need to understand your spreadsheet	Invite by email, role-based, done in 30 seconds
Data isolation between teams	One file per team	Workspace-isolated multi-tenancy
Time to set up	30–60 minutes for a usable template	Under 2 minutes

Honest take

We are not going to tell you that spreadsheets are evil. They are not. There are situations where a sheet is genuinely the better tool.

You have fewer than five recurring renewals. A single column in a Google Sheet works fine.
You do not need email reminders. If checking a calendar reminder is enough for your use case, you do not need automation.
You need rich computation. If you are running formulas to forecast cash flow against contract renewals, a sheet is the right tool. Trackords is a tracker, not a finance model.
You are the only user, on one device, with no team. Sheets shine for solo work.

When Trackords wins

You track more than ten renewal dates. Mental load increases nonlinearly with row count. Automation pays for itself by the tenth row.
Two or more people need to act on renewals. Spreadsheets are bad at "make sure the right person is notified at the right time".
You need an audit trail. For SOC 2, GDPR records of processing, or just "who changed this row last Tuesday".
You store sensitive attachments. Trackords keeps file uploads outside the public web root with MIME validation. Sharing a Drive link in a spreadsheet does not.
Missing a renewal has a real cost. Expired Iqamas, lapsed insurance, accidental contract auto-renewals at 15% price hikes — if any of those happening once would justify two minutes of setup, Trackords pays back immediately.

Migration

1

Create your free account

Sign up at trackords.com/register. Verify your email.
2

Download the CSV template

On the Import page, download the sample CSV. It already has the right column headers (title, type, expiry_date, vendor, owner_email, status, etc.).
3

Map your spreadsheet to it

Copy your existing rows over. Match your "Renewal date" column to expiry_date, your "Vendor" column to vendor, and so on. If a column does not have an equivalent in Trackords, drop it in the notes field.
4

Upload

Drag the CSV into the importer. Trackords validates every row and reports errors before saving anything. Fix errors and re-upload until clean.
5

Done

You are set. Reminders fire automatically — at 35, 10 and 5 days before each expiry, plus a critical alert on the day of expiry, with no further action needed.

Migration takes 5 minutes. Reminders start the moment you save.

Last reviewed 29 May 2026 · Published by Trackords

Questions? info@trackords.com