From spreadsheets to a job tracker: build vs buy for a small machine shop

Every machine shop over about five people reaches the same moment. The whiteboard has run out of columns, the job spreadsheet has three versions, and someone asks "shouldn't we have a system for this?"

What follows is the comparison we wish more shops saw before they bought a subscription they'd abandon eight months later.

What a job tracker actually has to do

Strip away the feature lists and a shop-floor job tracker has five jobs:

Show every live job, its status and its due date on one screen the whole shop can see.
Let the floor update status in under five seconds, from a phone or a tablet, without a login dance.
Flag what is late or about to be, without anyone compiling a report.
Tell a customer where their order is without a phone call.
Record enough about time and material that you can later compare quoted to actual.

Everything else, from scheduling optimisation to capacity planning to MRP, is a second-year problem. Most shops that buy a system with those features never switch them on.

The off-the-shelf options

Tool	Typical cost	Good at	Where shops get stuck
MRPeasy	~$49–149 per user / month	Full MRP, inventory, BOMs	Heavy for a job shop; your process must fit theirs
JobBOSS² (ECI)	Quote-based, often $5k+ setup plus subscription	Job-shop specific, quoting, scheduling	Dated UI, long onboarding, hard to leave
Katana	~$199–799 / month flat	Make-to-stock, Shopify-friendly	Not built for one-off engineered jobs
Fulcrum	Quote-based, mid-market	Modern UI, strong scheduling	Priced for 50+ person shops
Odoo (Manufacturing app)	~$25–38 per user / month plus implementation	Everything under one roof	Implementation partner costs; customisation becomes its own project

For a 12-person shop, three years of a mid-priced tool for six users comes to roughly $12,000 to $25,000 in subscriptions, plus onboarding, plus the staff hours spent bending your process to fit. You do not own anything at the end.

The custom option

A custom job board built around your actual workflow:

Cost: $4,000 to $9,000 to build; $200 to $400 a month to run.
Three-year total: roughly $11,000 to $23,000, and you own the code, the data and the hosting.
Time: three to five weeks to first use.
Users: unlimited. The apprentice gets a login too.

The numbers are close. The difference is not price, it is fit and ownership.

How to decide in an afternoon

Run this checklist with whoever runs the floor.

Buy off-the-shelf if you tick three or more:

Our process is fairly standard for our type of shop.
We're willing to change how we work to match the software.
Nobody here will own a system or think about improving it.
We need it running within two weeks.
We also want full MRP, BOMs and purchasing on day one.

Build custom if you tick three or more:

We've tried an off-the-shelf tool and the floor stopped using it.
Our quoting or routing logic is specific to us and it's where our margin comes from.
We hate per-seat pricing because we want everyone, including the floor, to have access.
We want customers to see status themselves.
We want to add our own quirks (a particular inspection step, a certain label, a client-specific report) without raising a ticket.

If you tick three on both lists, build the job board and keep accounting in Xero or QuickBooks. That combination covers 80 percent of what shops under 50 people need.

What a good custom job board looks like

This is the shape that works:

One board, three views: by status (kanban), by due date (list), by machine (lanes). No settings page needed to switch.
Big tap targets on the floor view. Greasy hands, old tablet, bright workshop. Status changes are one tap with an undo.
Due-date colour only. Green, amber, red. Nothing else competes for attention.
A customer status page. A link in the order confirmation. Customers stop calling within a fortnight.
Time capture that isn't a time clock. Start and stop on the job, nothing more. Costing comes from that later.
Export everything. CSV of every job, every status change, every time entry, any time. Your data is yours.

What it should not be

A full ERP in disguise. Resist adding stock control in week two. Get the board used first.
Dependent on the person who built it. Insist on documentation, a handover video, and the repo in your GitHub account.
Hosted on the vendor's servers under the vendor's name. Hosting should be in your account, with your card, and cost less than a coffee a day.

Next step

If you'd rather see your own board than read about one, that is what our free audit is for. One short call, a video of how we'd lay it out, and a clickable mockup. Then a two-week pilot at a fixed fee if you want to go further.

Book the call, or read how we price first.