How to track leads in a spreadsheet

By the WorkKitly Team · Last updated: November 2026 · 7 min read

A solo practice rarely loses work in the market. It loses work in the inbox: the enquiry answered at midnight and never followed up, the quote sent to someone whose name you now have to search three threads to find, the “let’s talk in the new year” that nobody wrote down — so January came and went in silence. None of that is a selling problem, and none of it is fixed by the CRM you were researching instead of replying. It is fixed by one spreadsheet with eight honest columns and a ten-minute weekly habit. A sheet you actually open beats a system you configured for a weekend and abandoned, every single week of the year.

1. The sheet: eight columns, nothing more

Resist the urge to design. A solo pipeline needs exactly eight columns, and every one of them earns its place by answering a question you will genuinely ask. Add a ninth only when a real question has gone unanswered twice — not because a CRM demo made it look professional.

Lead / Client — the person and the business, in one cell. Contact — the one address or number you actually reach them on. Source — where they found you: referral, search, a past client, a directory. This quiet column is the one that teaches you your marketing; after a year it shows which channel sends clients and which only sends compliments, the same source evidence the client list audit draws its verdicts from. Stage — where the conversation honestly stands, in four stages only: New, Talking, Quoted, and Won / Lost / Later. Four stages need no legend and no theatre; a fourteen-stage pipeline is a part-time job disguised as organisation. Value — the quoted figure, or your best estimate before a quote exists. Next step — a verb, always: send, call, chase, wait. If you cannot write a verb, the row is not tracked — it is merely remembered. Next date — the date that verb happens. This is the column the whole sheet exists for. Notes — one line, facts not feelings: what they asked, what you promised, what they care about.

Here is the whole thing at working size — four fictional rows, one in each honest condition:

Stare at how little it holds. No histories, no transcripts, no scoring model — and yet everything a follow-up needs is on those four lines: who, how to reach them, what they are worth, what happens next and when. The sheet is not a record of the past. It is a list of future verbs, with just enough context attached to perform them well.

2. The weekly ten minutes

A sheet without a rhythm is a museum. The rhythm is ten minutes, once a week — Friday works because the week’s conversations are still warm and next week’s diary is still shapeable — and it has one rule: every live row leaves the sweep with a next step and a next date, or it is honestly closed.

Work down the rows. A Talking row with no date becomes a sent message or a dated intention, never a third week of drift. A Quoted row past its date gets the follow-up it is owed, in the ladder order your proposal process already uses. A Later row is not a failure and not a graveyard: it is a stage with a review date attached, so the January conversation actually happens in January. And a row you are avoiding — the awkward chase, the quote you suspect was too high — gets its verb first. Avoidance is data too, and ten honest minutes is where it gets read.

The sweep compounds. Open the same sheet inside your solo quarterly business review and a quarter of rows becomes evidence: which sources produced Won rows, how long Quoted rows actually take to close, how many leads died of no follow-up at all. Stale rows are rarely a verdict on your market. They are a measurement of your follow-up, taken weekly, at a cost of ten minutes.

3. One record, feeding the money tools

The sheet’s second job is to be the single source the rest of your numbers are copied from — so nothing is ever typed twice, and nothing disagrees with itself.

The Value column is the pipeline, already totalled. Add the Quoted and Talking values and you have the raw inputs the pipeline income forecaster weighs into a forecast: what might land, and when it would need to. A forecaster fed from a living sheet is an estimate; one fed from memory is a hope with arithmetic attached.

The Won rows are next year’s client list, born pre-formatted. When the annual audit asks what each client paid and where they came from, the sheet already holds the source and the starting value; the audit adds the margin and the verdict. And the same rows, totalled by client, are exactly the shares the client concentration checker needs to warn you when one name has quietly become a third of your income. One record, three tools, no re-typing — that is the design principle, and it is why the columns were kept so few: every column you add is a column you must maintain in three places’ worth of moments.

4. The honesty rules

A tracker lies in predictable ways, so give it rules before it needs them. A lead is a person who enquired — who wrote, called or asked — not a person whose post you liked, not a business you intend to pitch. The moment hope gets rows, every total on the sheet becomes fiction and the forecast built on it is fiction squared.

Lost gets a reason. One word in the notes from a short list: price, timing, fit, ghosted. Four words cover nearly every ending, and together they are the raw material your project retrospective thinking needs: a season of “price” is a positioning question, a season of “ghosted” is a follow-up question, and you cannot tell which season you had unless the rows say so.

The sheet holds no secrets. Never passwords, never credentials, never client-confidential detail beyond the one factual line the follow-up needs — the same discipline the handover document follows when it points to where access lives instead of printing it. And the file gets backed up where your other business records live, on the same cycle. It deserves one line saying so in the systems you document — the sheet is named, owned and backed up like any other process in your process documentation, because by the second quarter it is quietly running your sales.

5. When to graduate to a real CRM

Graduation is earned by evidence, not by embarrassment at owning a spreadsheet. A real CRM starts paying its rent when one of three things becomes true: a second pair of hands needs to work the same pipeline and the sheet’s single-editor simplicity starts costing more than it saves; follow-ups slip despite the Friday sweep — the habit is proven and the volume, not the discipline, is the bottleneck; or the row count reaches the point where searching and segmenting beats scrolling, and you catch yourself building filters the sheet was never meant to hold.

Until then, the sheet wins on the only metric that has ever mattered in a solo practice: you actually open it. And if you do graduate, the migration is already done — your eight columns are the field list, your four stages are the pipeline, your Friday sweep is the routine the new tool must support. Export the sheet, map column to field, keep the ten minutes.

Because the tool was never the system. The system is a short list of honest rows, a verb and a date on every one of them, and ten minutes a week where those dates are kept true. That system ran on paper for a century before software arrived to sell it back. Keep the system; let the tools apply for the job of carrying it.

Questions

Related: the records around this one

The sheet holds the future — who is coming and what they might be worth. Its sibling holds the past: the client list audit gives every existing client a verdict from the same kind of evidence, and the two share a wall in any well-run practice. Week to week, the active rows on the sheet become the promises managed in how to manage multiple clients at once. Keep both records honest and the pipeline stops being a mystery in either direction.