Turn your job tracking spreadsheet into a live dashboard
Updated
Your job sheet may already hold everything the office needs. The trouble starts when someone has to copy it into a weekly report before anyone can see what is due, what is open and how much work is on the books.
A dashboard gives those figures a place to live. The team can keep updating the spreadsheet they know, while the office opens a view built from its rows.
Start with one row per job
Give each job a number that stays with it. Keep the due date, amount and status in their own columns. Put one set of headings above the data, with consistent names for statuses such as Open and Complete.
| Job | Due date | Amount | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| BS-AU-001 | 03/06/2026 | $1,200 | Complete |
| BS-AU-002 | 06/03/2026 | $2,300 | Open |
| BS-AU-003 | 05/09/2026 | $450 | Open |
These are example jobs. Their total is $3,950, including $2,750 of open work. Those two figures make a useful first check when you connect the sheet.
Keep money as numbers and dates as dates. In Google Sheets, set the sheet's locale to Australia if you mean day/month/year. In the example above, 03/06/2026 means 3 June and 06/03/2026 means 6 March. A neatly drawn chart is not useful if those dates have changed meaning.
Connect the sheet and check the columns
In Brightsheet, choose Connect a sheet and paste the link to your Google Sheet or Excel workbook in SharePoint. For Google Sheets, give the reader address shown on the screen Viewer access. A Microsoft workbook uses your organisation's approved access; your Microsoft administrator may need to help with the first connection.
The preview shows your headings and example values. Make the job number the row identifier, the amount a measure, the due date a date and the status a status. Your original headings stay as they are.
Brightsheet reads the source. It does not write changes back to the workbook.
Build the first view around the morning meeting
Start with the number of jobs, total amount, a breakdown by status and the rows underneath. Add a date filter when the question is “what is due this week?” rather than “what have we ever recorded?”
Check the total against the sheet, open a few individual jobs and read the last-sync time. A connected sheet is checked on its configured schedule, so the dashboard's timestamp matters when someone has just edited a row.
Once those checks agree, the next report can start with a link to the dashboard instead of another round of copying and formatting.