Free CMMS or Excel: which should you choose for your fleet?

Free CMMS to download: what exists in Excel

For a very small fleet, a handful of machines managed by one person, a well-built Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheet does the job. You note the machine’s ID, the last maintenance date, the next due date, the hour meter. It’s free, quick to set up, and everyone knows how to use it.

Trackary even offers a free, downloadable, ready-to-use Excel VGP tracking spreadsheet for this kind of starting setup (see /suivi-vgp-excel).

The real limits of an Excel file

A spreadsheet works well as long as one person handles it and the fleet stays small. Once several people need to edit it, the usual problems appear: several versions of the same file circulate by email, one edit overwrites a colleague’s, nobody knows which one is up to date.

An Excel file doesn’t send a reliable alert before a due date: you have to remember to open it and check. In the field, an operator can’t easily attach a photo of an anomaly to a spreadsheet row, or view it without a connection. And if the person keeping the file up to date leaves or is away, the whole history often becomes hard for anyone else to use.

• Several versions of the file circulating, none of them truly reliable
• No automatic alert before an important due date
• No field photo easily attached to a machine
• No offline use on a site without a connection
• Only one person who really knows the file

What about free CMMS tools found online?

Free CMMS tools do exist, often trial versions or limited tiers of paid software: capped number of machines, restricted number of users, some features reserved for paid plans. They can work for testing the idea of a CMMS on a very small fleet, but they quickly show their limits once the fleet or the team grows.

Excel, free CMMS, business CMMS: comparison by criterion

Here is what each solution lets you do, in practice.

Signs it’s time to switch tools

Certain signals show that a spreadsheet or a free CMMS is no longer enough.

• Several people manage maintenance and get in each other’s way in the file
• An important due date has already been caught too late
• The fleet has grown past around ten machines spread across several sites
• Operators report anomalies by text message or verbally, and some get lost
• The person keeping the file up to date goes on leave or leaves the company, and no one else can make sense of it

How to make the switch without starting from scratch

Moving from an Excel file to a CMMS doesn’t mean losing the history you’ve already built. Most of the useful information (list of equipment, known maintenance dates, VGP due dates) can be carried over from the existing file, without re-entering everything by hand, if the vendor offers help with setup.

It is best to make this transition gradually rather than all at once: start with the most critical or most numerous equipment, let the field team get used to the mobile app for reporting anomalies, then extend tracking to the whole fleet once the first habits are in place.

The special case of multiple sites

When an equipment fleet is spread across several sites, a single Excel file creates an extra difficulty: it often has to be circulated by email between people on each site, or centralised as one shared file, with the risk that two updates happen at the same time without anyone noticing.

A free CMMS capped on number of users can quickly become insufficient in this multi-site context, since each site needs its own access to report an anomaly or check a machine’s status in real time.