The WhatsApp group and the Excel sheet.
This is what most small businesses in India actually run on, and it deserves more respect than software companies usually give it: it costs nothing, everybody already knows how, and it works. It stops working in four specific places. If none of them hurt yet, change nothing.
The four places it breaks.
Nobody can tell what is still open
A message scrolls. Ten minutes of chat and this morning's job is above the fold. There is no list of what has not been done — only a history of what was said, in the order it was said.
Everything becomes "I sent you that"
There is no record of when anything reached anyone, so a disagreement about whether a job was passed on has no answer. Everybody remembers it differently and everybody is sincere.
The sheet is always yesterday
Somebody has to type into it, and they are doing it from memory at the end of the day. A duration typed on Friday about Tuesday is a number, not a fact.
It does not survive the person
The system lives in one manager's head and one laptop's Downloads folder. When they are on leave, so is the system.
What changes.
The job is typed once, into a box, and pointed at one person. It appears on their screen a couple of seconds later and stays there until they press Complete. It cannot scroll away, and there is no group for it to get lost in.
The two timestamps are taken by the software, so the sheet fills itself. History still exports to CSV — a lot of people want it in Excel anyway, and that is fine.
And it is still your office. The file sits on a PC you own, the software never contacts us, and nobody's personal phone number is part of the system.
Keep the WhatsApp group.
This replaces the part of it that hands out jobs. It does not replace the part where people talk to each other, and a tool that tried to would lose to WhatsApp on the first afternoon.
The cost of free.
| WhatsApp and Excel | WorkQueue | |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay | Nothing | ₹14,999 once |
| What it costs | Somebody's evening, every evening | An afternoon to install |
| What is still open | Read back through the chat | One column on a board |
| When it was received | Nobody knows | To the second |
| How long it took | Whatever gets typed in | Measured, not reported |
| If the manager is on leave | It stops | It keeps running |
| Where the record is | A phone and somebody's laptop | One file you can copy anywhere |
| Personal phone numbers involved | Everybody's | None |
The things people ask about this
We are only six people. Is this overkill?
Possibly. If everyone can see everyone and nothing gets lost, a group and a sheet is a perfectly good system and you should keep it. The trial is thirty days precisely so you can find out instead of arguing about it.
Can we keep using Excel?
Yes. History exports to CSV whenever you want it, so whatever report you already build in a spreadsheet, you can keep building — from numbers nobody typed in by hand.
Do employees need smartphones?
No, and that is one of the better reasons to move off a group. This runs on the office PCs people already work at. Nobody installs anything on their own phone, and nobody's personal number has to be in a work group.
What about people who are not at a PC?
Then this is not for them. The strip needs a Windows PC that is switched on while they work — drivers, field staff and shop floors without screens are a real limitation and not something we can talk you around.
Is our data safer than in a WhatsApp group?
It is somewhere different: one file on a PC in your office, rather than spread across everybody's phone backups. Whether that is safer depends entirely on whether you keep a copy of it — which is why the dashboard keeps asking you to export one.
Try it on your own team for thirty days.
Every feature, unlimited PCs, no card and nothing to cancel. We will help you install it, and if it does not fit, nothing of yours has left the office.