Manage production gear in Excel and the same problems keep showing up: double bookings you only find out about the day before, nobody quite sure who has what, and a register that can't be updated from the shoot. This article focuses on video, photo and event production: the five problems, the workarounds that help, and the limits that remain.
The day before a shoot, you're checking the gear and the wireless mic that should be there isn't. The register says it's available, but nobody knows who took it out last. Mix-ups like this are common in video, photo and event production. Gear doesn't just sit in a storeroom. It travels to locations, edit suites and crew members' homes. And shoot dates keep moving with the weather, the talent and the client's schedule.
Before building Werp™, we worked in video production ourselves. We tracked our gear in a spreadsheet, but the updates couldn't keep up with what was happening on shoots, and at some point they simply stopped. Looking back, the number of items wasn't what tripped us up. For equipment that never leaves the office shelves, a spreadsheet works fine even with a few hundred items. Gear that goes out on location every week is different: even with only a handful of items, the records quickly drift away from reality. The real dividing line was whether the gear leaves the building, and how often the people handling it change.
Excel and spreadsheets aren't the problem in themselves. When you have little gear and the same few people handle it, they do the job well. This article walks through five situations where spreadsheet-based gear management tends to break down in production work, then looks at what you can improve without leaving the spreadsheet, and at the signs that it's time to change how you record things altogether.
For a neutral, industry-agnostic set of criteria on whether it's time to move off Excel, see our separate article.Read the criteria for moving off spreadsheetsExcel is a very easy way to get started. It costs nothing, and you can add whatever fields you like. If a small team is looking after a few dozen items, you're unlikely to run into trouble. Production work, though, tends to stack up conditions that spreadsheets don't handle well.
The register might list "1 camera", for example, but on set you can't start shooting without the batteries and recording media that go with it. Track everything in detail and the number of rows balloons. Track things loosely and it becomes hard to spot what's missing. Striking that balance is what makes production gear difficult.
Once confirmed and tentative bookings start mixing in the same sheet, even reading it takes time. Color coding and cell comments can cover for this for a while. When nobody except the person who built the sheet can make sense of it, though, it may be time to rethink how you manage it.
These are problems that software features alone can't easily solve. When there's a gap between how gear actually moves and a method that relies on opening a file afterward to write things down, even the most carefully kept register goes out of date.
The same camera or lens ends up scheduled for two different jobs on the same day. Even if the register has check-out dates and expected return dates, someone still has to check for overlapping periods by hand, every time.
It gets harder when you own several units of the same item. Out of three, how many are free right now? You have to work that out from the booking sheet, and every schedule change means checking again.
In production, you can't simply move a shoot date because you're short on gear. If you discover the shortfall after the location, talent and crew are locked in, you're either scrambling to find a rental or changing what you shoot. Costs and rescheduling that an early warning would have avoided get bigger the closer you are to the shoot.
Anything the register doesn't capture gets filled in from the memories of whoever was involved. "I think someone took that lens out on last week's job" is sometimes enough to get by in the moment.
But this breaks down as soon as that person isn't around. They're on another shoot, they can't be reached, their contract has ended. When that happens, you lose track of where the gear is. All that can be handed over is what's in the register.
The trickiest case is a register that's mostly right. A sheet nobody trusts gets ignored and people look for something else. A sheet that's about 80% accurate keeps getting used. So work only grinds to a halt when someone hits stale information, and that usually happens when they're in a hurry.
Gear changes hands in front of the storeroom, in a location parking lot, or at a venue during load-out. When you're busy, opening a wide spreadsheet on a phone, finding the right row and typing in the details takes more effort than you'd expect.
So updates tend to get pushed back. Records entered after the fact inevitably include gaps and misremembered details. If you can't tell whether the register is current, you end up checking by chat or phone anyway.
More detailed entry rules look like they should improve accuracy, but they're pointless if nobody follows them on set. What matters is whether you can make the act of recording itself shorter.
A tracking sheet that has been in use for years gains a new version every time someone saves it under a different name: "latest", "latest_fixed", "FINAL". And sometimes the day you need to check something is exactly the day nobody on hand knows which one to open.
In formula-heavy sheets, deleting or copying rows can also break references. Moving to a cloud spreadsheet helps with simultaneous editing and change history. It still won't take care of maintaining complex formulas or managing who the file is shared with.
If keeping the file in order starts eating up real time, it's worth stepping back to the original goal. The point isn't to keep a tidy spreadsheet. It's to know the state of your gear when you need to.
Is it checked out, returned, or in for repair? Trying to work out that status automatically with spreadsheet formulas alone makes the design complicated. If you log history by adding one row per event, pulling out the current status becomes especially awkward.
There's also nothing on the gear itself to go on. Pick up a lens from the shelf and you can't immediately tell which row in the register it corresponds to. If you have several units of the same model, you have to match serial numbers.
And you're usually searching for gear when time is short. If something turns up missing the evening before a shoot or on the morning of it, asking around is faster than carefully tracing the history. That's not a matter of people trying harder. It happens because the physical gear and the records aren't connected.
We couldn't find any published data that measures how much time video and event production teams spend looking for gear. To give a sense of scale, here are the results of a survey from the construction industry, which has a similar structure. These aren't our own measurements, so read them as reference figures from another industry.
Thirty-five minutes a day sounds like something that gets absorbed into the gaps of a working day. Add it up over a year, though, and it comes to about 27 working days per person, more than a month's worth of workdays. At a production company, much of that searching tends to pile up the day before a shoot or on the morning of it, so it tends to feel heavier than the numbers suggest.
The other figure that stands out is that 4 in 10 respondents said not finding something had affected their work. How often a search ended up moving the schedule may say more about how it feels on the ground than the minutes spent searching. Because the survey covers construction, the numbers can't be applied as they are. Still, the tendency for search time to grow as more gear leaves the building should hold for production teams too.
None of this means you need to switch tools right away. Sometimes tightening up how you work is enough to keep Excel or a spreadsheet going for a long time.
You can start on any of these today. Data validation and naming rules in particular pay off quickly, cutting down on searches that miss items and on duplicate entries.
All of them, however, assume people will keep opening the sheet and updating it. If opening a spreadsheet during load-out is itself the burden, better entry rules can only help so much. We tried every one of these workarounds before changing how we recorded things, and we still think that was the right order. But the problems we expected the workarounds to solve mostly stayed unsolved.
And if you're reluctant to give outside crew edit access, every update has to go through someone in-house. With a few dozen items and a fixed team, that may not be a problem. With hundreds of items constantly going in and out and frequent schedule changes, keeping the register up to date can easily become a job in its own right.
Here's how Werp™ addresses the problems above. Werp™ is a SaaS for managing equipment, bookings and members by workspace. It runs entirely in the browser, so crew and outside freelancers don't need to install a dedicated app.
You put a QR label on each piece of gear. Scanning it with a phone camera opens a page where a single button records a check-out or a check-in (the return). Who took what, and when, is logged automatically, so you never have to dig back through a spreadsheet to find out who last used that lens. Even in the middle of load-out, it's just scan the label and press a button.
Bookings come with a conflict check: if the gear is already reserved for the dates you pick, the booking can't be made. That stops a double booking when the schedule is being set, not on the morning of the shoot. When a return date is approaching or has passed, the borrower automatically gets a reminder email, so nobody has to chase people up.
A note on the effort of setting things up: WerpAI™ fills in model numbers, specs and product images from a product name or barcode (JAN/EAN/UPC-A), which cuts down on typing in every item by hand. If you already have a register in Excel, CSV import is available on every plan.
Excel and spreadsheets are a perfectly sensible place to start with gear management. While you have little gear and a fixed team, entry rules and splitting things across sheets can go a long way toward keeping it manageable.
It's worth reconsidering when many kinds of gear leave the building for each job, the people involved keep changing, and schedules keep shifting. As we said at the start, the dividing line wasn't the number of items but whether the gear leaves the building. Double bookings that stay hidden until the last minute, relying on people's memory to know who has what, a register that doesn't get updated on set: if more than one of these sounds familiar, it's worth trying a different way of recording, starting with part of your gear.
You don't need to move everything at once. Start with a single job using only the gear that gets borrowed most. Check that recording it on set is easy enough, then widen the scope from there.
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