Snag list in Excel or a snagging app: which one actually gets used

Where a spreadsheet works

A spreadsheet is the right tool for a snag list more often than app vendors like to admit. We make Site Audit, a snagging app for Android, so read the rest of this with that in mind. But the honest starting point is that a sheet is fine in four common situations.

• Small jobs. A bathroom refit with fifteen snags does not need software. Fifteen rows, a builder who knows the job, and a walk-through on the day is enough.
• One person does everything. If you inspect, you chase, and you close, there is no hand-off. The problems below mostly come from handing a list to somebody who was not there.
• Photos are not needed as evidence. Some lists are reminders rather than proof. “Touch up skirting in hall” does not need a photograph if the painter is standing next to you.
• Somebody upstream already wants a sheet. If the main contractor runs a master register in Excel and expects your items in their columns, producing anything else creates work for them and friction for you.

If you are in one of those situations, keep the sheet. Nothing in this guide will change the outcome of a fifteen-item job, and the money is better spent elsewhere.

The columns a usable snag sheet needs

A sheet that works has more structure than most people give it on the first attempt. The columns below are the minimum for a list that somebody other than the author can act on.

1. Number. Typed by hand, not a formula. More on why in the next section.
2. Location. Precise enough to walk to. “Unit 4, ensuite, wall left of mirror” rather than “bathroom”.
3. Description. What is wrong, in factual terms, with a measurement where one is possible.
4. Remedy. What you expect to be done about it.
5. Trade. Who owns it. A named subcontractor, not “builder”.
6. Priority. Three levels. More than that and nobody uses the middle ones consistently.
7. Status and date closed. Open, in progress, closed, disputed. Never delete a closed row.
8. Photo reference. The filename or filenames of the photographs that go with the item. This is the column that causes most of the pain.

If you want a starting point rather than building this from scratch, the printable snag list template has these columns laid out and explains what goes in each one.

Where it breaks

None of what follows is a criticism of Excel. Every problem here comes from asking a grid of cells to do a job it was never built for.

The photo problem. This is the big one. A spreadsheet cell cannot hold a photograph in any useful way. So the photos live in the phone’s camera roll, named IMG_4471, IMG_4472 and so on, and the row has a column that says IMG_4471. That link survives exactly as long as nobody renames, moves, deletes or re-imports the files. It survives until the phone is replaced. When the sheet goes to the client and the photos go as a separate folder of forty files, the client opens IMG_4471 and sees a close-up of white plaster with no idea which row it belongs to. Pasting the images into the sheet itself makes the file enormous, breaks sorting, and still leaves them uncaptioned.

Numbering drift. The obvious way to number rows is a formula or the row index. Both break the moment somebody inserts a row for a missed item or sorts by trade. Item 47 becomes item 52, and the email from last week that said “47 is disputed” now points at a different defect. The fix is to type the numbers by hand and never touch them, which works until somebody sorts and forgets.

Sending each trade their own items. A plasterer handed a hundred-row register with eleven plastering items will read none of it. The right move is one list per trade. In a spreadsheet that means filtering by trade, copying the visible rows into a new file, hunting down the matching photos from the camera roll, attaching them, and doing it again for the electrician, the tiler and the painter. It is not hard. It is just slow enough that most people stop doing it after the second revision.

Version chaos. Two people editing one sheet produces two sheets. Snags_v3_final.xlsx and Snags_v3_final_JM.xlsx both exist, both have closures the other lacks, and somebody spends an hour merging them by eye. Cloud sheets fix the concurrent edit but not the offline case, and a site with no signal is the normal case, not the exception.

Typing on a phone on site. Excel on a phone is a desktop interface squeezed into a small screen. Tapping into the right cell in the right row, on a stairwell, with a torch in the other hand, is not a workflow anyone chooses twice. So the sheet gets filled in from paper notes or voice memos that evening, which is where the location details get vague.

The evening job. A sheet is not a report. When the client expects a document with a cover, a summary and a page per item with photographs, somebody rebuilds the whole thing in Word: paste the table, insert each image, type each caption, fix the page breaks. Then the client asks for a revision and the rebuild happens again.

The hybrid most people actually run

The choice is rarely one or the other. The common arrangement on jobs of any size is a phone app on site and a spreadsheet in the office.

The inspector captures items on the phone, with photographs attached to each one, while walking the building. At the end of the walk the register is exported as a CSV and dropped into whatever master tracker the project already runs. The project manager keeps working in their sheet. The photographed PDF goes to the client and the trades. Nobody upstream has to change how they work.

This is fine, and it is fine to say so plainly. The app is doing the part a spreadsheet is bad at, which is capture and photographs, and the spreadsheet is doing the part it is good at, which is tracking and totals across a project. The only requirement is that the app can export a register in a format the sheet will open, with stable item numbers so the two stay in step.

Side by side

The table below is by task rather than by feature, because the features only matter through what they let you do on a Tuesday afternoon with sixty open items.

Read down the spreadsheet column and a pattern shows: the sheet is competitive on cost, on familiarity, and on anything that happens at a desk. It loses on anything that happens with a phone in one hand, and on anything involving a photograph.

When an app pays for itself

There is no magic item count. The tipping point is structural, and it arrives when one of the following becomes true.

• More than one project at a time. One sheet is manageable. Four sheets, four photo folders and four sets of trades is where the version and photo problems compound.
• The photographs are the evidence. On a pre-handover inspection, a defects liability claim or anything that might be disputed, an uncaptioned image in a folder is not evidence. A captioned image attached to a numbered item with a date is.
• The client expects a branded PDF. If the deliverable is a document rather than a list, the rebuild-in-Word job happens on every revision. An app that generates the document from the register removes that job entirely.
• The same trade needs their own list. The moment you are issuing filtered lists to subcontractors and reissuing them after each site visit, the copy-paste-attach cycle is the bulk of your admin.

The cost side of the calculation is smaller than it used to be. For disclosure, Site Audit is free for one project, including a finished PDF with a small credit line in the footer, and the Pro upgrade is a one-off A$29.99 (local pricing varies) for unlimited projects, clean PDFs, one filtered report per contractor and CSV export of the register. Other apps price by monthly subscription, which changes the maths if you run a small number of jobs a year. Compare the annual cost, not the sticker.

What to look for in an app

If you have decided a spreadsheet is no longer enough, the criteria below are the ones that separate an app you will still be using in a year from one you abandon after a job.

Site Audit was built around that list, which is why it stores everything on the device with no account, backs the whole project up to a single zip file, and exports CSV as well as PDF. But it is an Android app from a small maker, and it is not the only option. The comparison of snagging apps for Android goes through the alternatives against the same criteria. And whichever tool ends up holding the register, the report it produces still has to be written well, which is covered in how to write a snagging report.