GrazieChef vs Excel for orders and tables
Many venues manage orders, tables and the bill with a homemade Excel spreadsheet. It works while the venue is small — here's where it holds up and where it breaks, compared honestly with GrazieChef.
Excel (or Google Sheets) is free and already installed, and for a very small venue with few orders it can be enough. The problem shows up with volume: a file that has to be updated by hand, opened by one person at a time, with no direct link to the kitchen.
| Excel | GrazieChef | |
|---|---|---|
| Orders | Manual spreadsheet — no real-time send to the kitchen, updated by hand | Order from the phone at the table, reaches the KDS instantly |
| Real-time table status | No live view — you only find out by asking on the floor | Real-time table map, on every device |
| Closing the bill | Manual calculation, risk of error | Automatic calculation, with table split and merge |
| From multiple devices at once | A single file — conflicts if opened by more than one person | Synced in real time across every device |
| Offline | A local file opens without a network (but is not shared across devices) | Needs a connection; installable as an app and warns immediately when the network drops |
| Cost | "Free", but takes time to build and keep updated by hand | Free plan forever, Starter at €19/month (€190/year) |
If the venue has very few tables and a single shift, a well-built Excel sheet can hold up. It starts breaking down when more than one person needs to update it together, when the kitchen needs to know instantly what was ordered, or when a typo in the bill calculation costs more than the time it saved.
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← See the other comparisons too (pen and paper, traditional POS)