So, I'm a week in on evaluating SmartSuite as a possible replacement for Smartsheet, and I've been hung up on how to structure everything for my small construction company. Smartsheet works really well for building our quotes, which often have 100-200 items in them and contain cost, price, resource, and time data that use parent-child relationships for different levels of reporting. For example, I use individual item data to build my project's prices, categories of items for "line item" details in customer quotes and variance calculations, and total project price (or project time, labor hours, etc.) for internal reporting, contracts, and overall business metrics. Smartsheet does this really well and leverages my excel-fu acquired over decades of building low-tech templates.
What Smartsheet does not do well, at least for my use case, is make it easy to create or modify documents within the app. More importantly, our project estimates have a ton of fields and selecting field visibility is, err, less than fun. Thus, I was very excited when I decided to look again at how a relational database might give me better flexibility using queries (views and filters) and found that SmartSuite has a new document creator.
Here's the roadblock that I hit that almost made SmartSuite a no-go: All of the SmartSuite learning materials, forum posts, templates, and youtube videos I viewed all showed summing and rollups (the parent-child relationships my estimating process is built on) being conducted across apps, which combined with the current sub-task's limited functionality, left me wondering how I was going to get the parent-child layers I need. The summary display set to "Sum" would give me the information I needed but no way to use it. The strong and unrefuted impression I had until an hour ago was that I would need to bounce numbers between apps to get the levels of subtotals and totals I needed. Not a workable solution.
It must have been the Quarter Pounder I had for lunch that made my subconscious realize that life is too short to stay stuck, but walking back into the office I realized that I can mimic the parent-child arrangement I need by linking my Estimates app back to itself, and link "Item" records to "Class" records, then up to "Division" records, summing each step along the way and simplifying each strata's visibility using views. From here I can extract the level of rollup I need just by selecting the appropriate "level" records and linking them to my contracts and metrics apps. Once I build them, of course. 😁 By the way, I was just about to schedule an office hour, but I always learn platforms the best when I work through strategic problems myself, and then build the third version.
So, I might be special to a few people but I'm certainly not that special, and there has to be a whole bunch of people like me out there that do not think it's possible to create the hierarchy we need with a non-hierarchal tool. So, for the love of all that is holy, please kick out a template or a few videos that show this painfully obvious solution for us cave-dwelling spreadsheet-thinking people. It would have saved me sooo much time, but hey, it takes me an hour and a half just to watch 60 Minutes.
Great, absolutely fantastic tool by the way and definitely the future of my business's data organization.
Best,
Mike