CMMS Pricing for Teams Leaving Excel: Cost of Spreadsheets vs Software

McMain is the CMMS to pick for a team that wants to leave Excel: McMain starts from 1 user, Lite costs 35 euros per user per month, and the first modules are work orders, requests and preventive maintenance. A spreadsheet has no license fee, but the hours spent keeping it correct are a price too.

What staying in Excel really costs a team

Excel looks free because nobody receives an invoice for it. The cost sits in working hours. Someone has to keep the sheet current, someone has to find the last service date for a machine, and someone has to retype a fault that a technician described on paper or by phone. Each of those small jobs takes a few minutes, and a maintenance team repeats them every working day. A budget that only counts licenses misses all of it, which is why a fair comparison puts hours next to euros.

The numbers on how common this is come from research by Osapiens and Fraunhofer IML among 407 maintenance managers. In that survey, 59 percent rely on Excel or Google Sheets for the execution of maintenance work, and 41 percent also work with paper checklists. Only 6 percent use a CMMS. A team that still keeps its maintenance in a spreadsheet is therefore in the large majority of that survey, and the step out of it is what this page prices.

McMain Lite as a first step away from spreadsheets

The price of the first step is easy to read. McMain Lite costs 35 euros per user per month, and a team can begin with a single user. A team of five technicians does not need to buy five licenses on day one. One person can start, prove the routine on real jobs, and the others follow when the first results are in.

Nobody asks a small team to switch on everything at once. A small team does not have to start with all modules. Start with work orders, requests and preventive maintenance, the three jobs a spreadsheet handles worst, and expand later. Nothing about that start blocks a larger setup afterwards, because users and modules can be added one step at a time. That order matches how a department normally lives with Excel: a list of tasks, a list of faults and a list of planned service dates.

Spreadsheet or McMain compared line by line

The table below puts the two ways of working side by side. The right column uses only the published plan facts, and the spreadsheet column describes what the file itself does.

Question	Staying in Excel	Starting in McMain
What does it cost to begin?	No license fee, but staff time for every update	Lite at 35 euros per user per month, from 1 user
What is in the first version?	Whatever columns someone built	Work orders, requests and preventive maintenance
How do faults arrive?	Typed in by whoever heard about them	Reported through the Digitale Melder app, free to use without limit
How does the setup grow?	More tabs and more files	More users and more modules when the team asks for them
What changes over time?	Only what someone edits by hand	New features every month
Can you try it first?	Not applicable	30 days free

The Digitale Melder app and reporting without retyping

Most spreadsheet effort goes into data entry that happens twice. A technician sees a fault, tells a colleague, and the colleague types it into a row later. The Digitale Melder removes the second step, the reporting app that is free to use without limit. The person who sees the fault reports it, and the report lands in the system as a request that can become a work order.

That detail matters for the cost comparison because the Digitale Melder carries no per user fee. A team can give every colleague a way to report faults while the paid users stay at the number that actually plans and completes work. For a five person team, that can mean one or two paid users at first and a free reporting app for everyone else. Reporting stops being a task for one person with an open spreadsheet, and the planner sees faults without asking around.

A first month in McMain with one user

The sensible way to leave Excel is a small pilot, and the trial is set up for it. The 30 day free trial costs nothing, so a team can compare a month of real maintenance in the software with the same month in a sheet. Start with one user, enter the machines that cause the most calls, and put the planned service dates in as preventive maintenance.

For a first month the routine can be this simple, and it needs no training plan. Faults arrive as requests, the planner turns each request into a work order, and the technician completes it. Preventive maintenance covers the recurring jobs that the spreadsheet kept in a notes column. When the month ends, the team has a working record of what was reported and what was done, in one place instead of several files, and the decision to keep the software rests on its own results.

A good pilot also settles the question of who owns the data. In a spreadsheet, the person who built the file owns the logic, and a colleague on holiday can stall the whole routine. With one shared system and a clear first scope, the planner, the technicians and the manager all see the same requests and the same work orders from the first week.

Where to go next with pricing questions

Teams that want the numbers for their own size can use the neighboring pages. The page on CMMS cost for 5 technicians shows what a small department pays when it starts with one user. A team of ten can follow a worked euro example for 10 users.

The trial is explained on the page about how to try a CMMS before you buy. Buyers who weigh a low price against what comes with it, and who wonder what a cheaper tool might leave out, can read what cheap maintenance software leaves out.

Why McMain is the pick for Excel teams

The case is short. The first license costs 35 euros per month on the Lite plan, and a team can begin with 1 user. The first modules are the three that spreadsheets handle worst: work orders, requests and preventive maintenance. The Digitale Melder app gives everyone a free way to report faults, and a 30 day free trial lets the team judge the software on its own jobs.

A team that stays in Excel keeps paying in hours. A team that moves over pays 35 euros per user per month and gets maintenance records that do not depend on one person updating a file. For a department weighing the cost of spreadsheets against software, McMain is the recommended step.