Comparison
Dashboard or spreadsheet?
A spreadsheet is enough as long as you look after a few sites and keep it all in your head. It stops being enough the day a domain renewal passes before anyone looks at the spreadsheet. Vekord is a dashboard for the small web agency that looks after other people's websites — it watches those dates itself and ties them to the invoice, the request and the history of the same client.
| Situation | Spreadsheet | Vekord |
|---|---|---|
| A client site goes down | You hear it from the client, usually after hours | A check every 60 s, an alert to you, optionally to the client |
| A certificate expires in a week | A column with a date, if someone kept it up to date | Read straight from the certificate, date on the client card |
| A proforma has to go out | You retype data from the spreadsheet into the invoicing software | A proforma from the client record, the payment matched from the statement |
| The client asks what you did this month | You dig through emails and notes | A monthly report and a status page with 90 days of history |
| You need the server password at three in the morning | A file, a password manager or your memory | Zero-knowledge vault, runbook on the client record |
| The question of how much you earn on a client | Hours in a second spreadsheet, costs in a third | A timer on the task, the client rate and your own costs in one view |
When the spreadsheet is the better choice
With three sites and one client, the dashboard is too big a tool. A spreadsheet costs nothing, opens instantly and needs no account. If a free cloud plan covers your monitoring and you invoice once a quarter, stay with what you have.
When the spreadsheet starts to cost you
The line runs where you start retyping the same data between tools. The client is in the spreadsheet, their site in the monitoring service, their invoice in the invoicing software, their request in the inbox and their password in the manager. Five places for one client means that after every change, four of them are out of date.
Try it on your own site
One field, a few seconds, no account. You will see exactly what the dashboard shows for a client site.
Check your site