Why tile dealers still run on spreadsheets

Walk into a tile dealership with any turnover you like and you will find a spreadsheet doing the real work. The received explanation is that the trade is behind. Having spent years building software for it, we think the explanation is simpler: most of the software on offer is a poor fit.

The catalogue breaks everything

A dealer carries several brands, each with collections, each in multiple sizes and finishes, each with batch variation that matters commercially. That is not a product list, it is a hierarchy several levels deep that changes every season.

Generic inventory software models this as SKUs with attributes and falls over on the first tile that comes in six sizes and four surfaces. The spreadsheet, for all its faults, does not impose a structure that is wrong.

The sale does not have a pipeline

CRM assumes a lead moves through stages toward a close. A tile sale involves a homeowner who visits three times over two months, a contractor who influences the choice, an architect who may have specified something else entirely, and a decision that turns on whether the batch is available.

Forcing that into a pipeline produces a CRM full of stale opportunities nobody updates, which is worse than the spreadsheet it replaced.

Samples are a logistics problem nobody models

Sample boards go out to architects and contractors and come back, or do not. They represent real inventory and real cost, and almost no system built for retail has a concept for them.

What actually works

Systems that model the catalogue properly before anything else, that treat dealer and specifier relationships as distinct from transactions, and that start by replacing one spreadsheet completely rather than all of them partially.

The dealers we work with are not resistant to software. They are resistant to software that makes their job harder, which is a reasonable position.