Broidry vs spreadsheets
Most embroidery businesses track orders in a spreadsheet, and for a while that's the right answer. It costs nothing, it does exactly what you tell it to, and you already know how to use it. This page is about the points where a sheet stops holding a machine embroidery shop together, what Broidry does at those points, and an honest list of the shops that should stay on the sheet.
Google Sheets is free. Excel you're already paying for. There's nothing new to subscribe to, nothing new to log into, and no setup evening standing between you and writing down your first order.
Add a column whenever you want one. Nobody on a product team has to decide that embroidery shops need somewhere to record bobbin thread or the name of the school. You just type it.
It opens with the internet down. It prints. It backs up to a drive you control, and you can hand it to an accountant without asking anybody for permission.
These six show up in a personalized embroidery business specifically. None of them mean the spreadsheet is bad software. They're about what an embroidery order carries that a grid of cells was never going to hold: a spelling, a font, a thread number, and a yes from the customer.
01
The row says MAMA crewneck, sand, size large. The exact wording, the font, whether anything goes on the sleeve, the thread color: all of it is still sitting in a Facebook message from three weeks ago. So you sit down to stitch and you read the whole conversation again. Typing the order into a sheet didn't save you that trip, because nobody types a whole spec into a sheet.
02
Approval happens in a chat. A photo, a yes that looks perfect, maybe a screenshot you took at the time. Then the piece comes out spelled the way she typed it and not the way she meant it, and there's nothing in the spreadsheet that settles who got it wrong. A remake costs you a blank, thread, machine time, and the conversation.
03
A spreadsheet can't see your Venmo, your card deposits, or your Etsy payouts. The paid column is a manual note, and it's the column that goes stale first. The order that gets stitched before it was paid for is almost always an order somebody forgot to update.
04
Name, phone number, address, shirt size, what she ordered last spring. You retype it or copy it down from an old row every time she comes back. And the old row is usually the incomplete one, so the gaps come forward with it.
05
She wants the same sweatshirt as last year. Which stitch file was it? At what size, in which thread numbers, in which font? A spreadsheet holds a note if you wrote one. It doesn't hold the design file, the thread numbers, or the font. So the second piece rarely matches the first one closely enough for a customer who's holding both of them.
06
A due date in a cell is text. It doesn't move to the top of the list. It doesn't warn you that three orders are due the same Friday, and it has no idea how long each of those pieces takes on the machine. You find out when you scroll. Or when the customer asks.
Read the last group closely. A spreadsheet wins four of those six rows, and those wins are real.
Whether the details you need at the machine are written down somewhere you can find them.
| Feature | A spreadsheet | Broidry |
|---|---|---|
| Where the order details live | In the sheet if you typed them there. In the original message if you didn't. | On the order: wording, font, placement, thread color, size, and quantity, in the fields the customer filled in. |
| Customer approves a mockup before you stitch | Not part of a spreadsheet. Approval lives in the chat, if it lives anywhere. | The customer approves a preview drawn on your garment in your real threads, and the approval is stored on the order with the date. |
| Spelling confirmed in writing | Whatever you typed into the cell, with no second check. | The customer confirms the exact wording before the order reaches the queue. |
Whether the paid column can be trusted at a glance.
| Feature | A spreadsheet | Broidry |
|---|---|---|
| Payment status | A column you update by hand, and the first thing to go out of date. | Card payments taken through Broidry mark the order paid on their own. Venmo, cash, and check are recorded on the order in one step. |
| Deposits and balances | Two more columns and your own arithmetic. | A deposit and the remaining balance are tracked on the order, and an order reaches the stitching queue when it's paid on the terms you set. |
| What you made this month | A formula you build and maintain yourself. | The Money page adds up what you collected, what customers still owe, and your expenses, from the orders you already entered. |
The second time a customer orders is where a spreadsheet costs the most time.
| Feature | A spreadsheet | Broidry |
|---|---|---|
| Customer records | Retyped or copied down from an old row on every order. | A customer book with their details and everything they've ordered before. |
| Design, thread, and font library | Only what you remembered to note in a cell. | Your stitch files, your Madeira thread numbers, and your fonts are stored and searchable, and each finished order keeps a record of what was used on it. |
| Reordering a past piece | Scroll back, read old messages, and hope the note was complete. | Open the past order and repeat it with the same design, size, and threads. |
A date only helps if something does the sorting.
| Feature | A spreadsheet | Broidry |
|---|---|---|
| What is due next | Sort the sheet by hand, and remember to re-sort it after every new order. | The queue sorts by ship date, and the piece due soonest is at the top. |
| Warning before you miss a date | None. A cell can't flag itself. | Orders that look like they'll miss their ship date at your current pace are flagged in the queue. |
| How long the work will take | Your own estimate, in your head. | Each order carries an estimated machine time, so the queue adds up to hours. |
The places a spreadsheet is still the better tool.
| Feature | A spreadsheet | Broidry |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free with Google Sheets, or included in an Excel license you already pay for. | Free plan at $0 a month with all the core features, a 2% fee on payments taken through Broidry, and 15 orders a month that are paid outside Broidry. Paid plans are $19, $39, and $79 a month. |
| Flexibility | Total. Any column, any formula, any layout you want. | Fields are built around embroidery orders. That's why they're already filled in, and it's also the limit: you can't invent a column. |
| Works with no internet connection | Yes, with a desktop spreadsheet file. | No. Broidry runs in a browser and needs a connection. |
| Learning it | You already know how. | An afternoon to load your designs, threads, fonts, and prices. |
| More than one person working in it | Share the file and everyone can edit it. | One user on the Free and Maker plans. A second team seat is on the Shop plan at $39 a month. |
| Getting your numbers out | It's already a file. | A CSV of every order, payment, and expense, formatted for an accountant. |
Broidry pricing on this page checked July 2026 against the plans on the pricing page.
Most order sheets fail the same way. They record that an order exists, without recording what the order is. Here are the columns that let you stitch straight from the sheet and never open the conversation again.
Three habits matter more than the columns do. Fill the whole row in the moment the order is confirmed, while you still have the conversation open. Sort by needed-by date, because that's the order you'll actually stitch in. And keep a second tab for customers, one row per person, with the threads and sizes they've used before, so a reorder starts from a record instead of a hunt through old messages.
If none of those describe your month, the sheet is costing you more than it saves. It costs you a remake, a date you missed, and an evening spent scrolling back through a chat to work out what somebody ordered.
One row per order, and write the whole specification into the row the moment the order is confirmed, while the conversation is still in front of you. The row needs the customer and how to reach them, the garment with brand, color, size, and quantity, every placement named out loud, the exact wording for each placement, the font, the thread colors by number, the design file and its stitch count, the price, what's been paid and how, the needed-by date, and whether it ships or gets picked up. Then sort the list by needed-by date instead of order date. That's the order you'll stitch in.
There are plenty of free templates, and the useful part of any of them is the column list. Copy the column list on this page into a blank sheet and you've got the same thing. A template only helps if you fill in every column on every order. The usual failure is a template with twenty columns where six get filled in, and then you're reading old messages anyway.
Usually at the point where you can't stitch straight from the sheet anymore. If you have to open the original message to find out what the customer actually wanted. If you can't tell at a glance which orders are paid. If a reorder means scrolling back through last year's chats to work out which design and which thread you used. If you've missed a date. At that point the sheet has stopped being the system, and it's a list of things that are happening somewhere else.
Yes. Save your sheet as a CSV file and upload it. Broidry recognizes the official exports from seven selling platforms on its own, and for any other spreadsheet it asks you which column holds the customer, the item, the price, and the date, then shows you what will land before anything is added. Past orders come in as history, so your customer list and your money history aren't starting from nothing. Your original sheet stays exactly where it is.
The Free plan is $0 a month and includes the core features. It charges a 2% fee on payments taken through Broidry and allows 15 orders a month that were paid outside Broidry, such as Venmo or cash. The paid plans are Maker at $19 a month, Shop at $39 a month, and Atelier at $79 a month.
Broidry is order-management software, not accounting software. The Money page shows what you collected, what you're owed, your expenses, and a profit estimate, and it exports a CSV of every order, payment, and expense that an accountant can work from. If you use bookkeeping software or a bookkeeper, keep using it. This replaces the order-tracking sheet. Your books stay where they are.
Broidry is order-management software for machine embroidery shops. Orders from Etsy, Facebook, text, and email land on one list with a price, a status, and a due date. Your design files, thread colors, and fonts sit in a library you can search, so a reorder is a lookup. The Free plan is $0 a month and there's no credit card to start.