Aside from the typical accounting spreadsheet, Microsoft Excel and other spreadsheet programs, can do everything from calculating the quantities of your estimates to handling all of your mailing and marketing needs. I am sure that there are many more uses for the painting contractor; but, these two are the things that I use Excel most in my painting business.

As far as estimating for the painting business, the Excel spreadsheet can be set up to do the entire estimate, or just use it to add to your existing estimating software. Most of the estimating software is variations on the spreadsheet. On-line courses, tutorials, or even a class or two will teach you a world of things to do with this software that will make your job easier.

One of the areas that I originally started using the spreadsheet for was to add and compute ceiling square footages, wall square footages, and baseboard footages. With a really simple formula you can make a tool that will complete the calculation of room or siding square footages in the blink of an eye. One other thing that can be added to this formula is a factor such as high time difficulty. The idea being that painting something at 8' is a lot faster going than painting something at 20'. So what I do is to insert a multiplier at some point in my spreadsheet that multiplies the item by a high time difficulty factor. For example, if I have a house that is 1000sf of siding at 8' and 1000sf of siding at 20', I would take the final figure for the siding at 20' and multiply by 1.6 or whatever factor you might like to use. In text format this sounds complicated; but, when done inside of a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, it becomes very easy to set up and use.

The beauty of a template is that once the work of creating the formula is finished, the difficult part never needs doing again. Whether it is the template that you use to cut out a piece of wood, or the spreadsheet that does all the boring calculations over and over, templates can take the drudgery out of repetitious work. Learning just a fraction of what Excel does can make your estimating easier.