comparison
Mise vs Spreadsheets
A spreadsheet is a good ledger and a poor workflow. It will happily record a number nobody approved, against a budget nobody checked, for a delivery nobody verified — and it will never tell you which of those happened.
Spreadsheets — that one Google Sheet everyone half-uses until someone edits the wrong cell on the busiest day of the week.
No approvals, no notifications, no history. Someone will overwrite someone else's data on the busiest day. I have watched this happen more than once.
side by side
Mise vs spreadsheets
| Mise | spreadsheets | |
|---|---|---|
| Approval | Request → approve in full or in part → routed. Every step logged with user and timestamp. | A cell changes. Nothing records who agreed to it. |
| Budget check | Approval limits per role; the check happens before the order is raised | After the fact, if someone builds the formula |
| Receiving | Photograph the delivery note; OCR fills quantities and flags what is short against the PO | Typed in again by hand, or not at all |
| Two people at once | Multi-user with per-role permissions | Shared documents overwrite each other; local copies diverge |
| Audit trail | Every approval, rejection, delivery and issuance logged | Version history, if it is a cloud sheet and nobody exported it |
| Cost | From $79 / month | Effectively free, plus the hours spent maintaining it |
| More than one site | Per-location stock and transfers, with one view across them | One file per site, reconciled by hand |
| Price history per supplier | Accumulates as deliveries are received | Only if someone keeps typing it in |
| A new starter using it correctly | Their role sets what they can see and do | They can edit any cell, including the ones holding the formulas |
where these figures come from
- Mise pricing
- Starter $79/mo · 14-day free trial · no credit card required
- www.miseapp.app · retrieved 2026-08-09
Every claim above is taken from the vendor’s own published page on the date shown. Prices change; if you find one of these out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
the other side
Choose spreadsheets if
- One person does all the ordering and there is nobody to approve anything.
- You order from two or three suppliers and already know every price by heart.
- You are testing whether a process works at all before paying for software to run it.
Google Sheets is free, and free is a real advantage. If the process fits in one sheet and one person owns it, a sheet is not the thing holding you back.