Rehabfolio vs spreadsheets

Every flipper starts in a spreadsheet

And for your first deal or two, that is fine. The problem is not that spreadsheets are bad at math — they are great at math. The problem is everything around the math: where the numbers came from, who changed them, and which file is the real one. Here is what that actually costs you.

The five ways a sheet quietly taxes you

1. Comp math by hand

Every ARV, every max offer, every what-if is a manual recalc. Change one repair line and three other cells are stale until you notice. The bigger your deal flow, the more offers go out on yesterday's numbers.

2. No source evidence

A cell that says $760,000 cannot show you the comp it came from. When a partner or a hard-money lender asks "where did you get that ARV?", the answer is a shrug and a Zillow tab you closed last week.

3. Version chaos

DealAnalyzer_FINAL_v7_jons-edits(2).xlsx in a shared drive, plus the copy on your desktop, plus the one your partner "just tweaked" last night. Nobody knows which file priced the offer you sent this morning.

4. No permissions

Anyone with the link can edit money cells — or you lock the whole file and now nobody can see anything. There is no middle ground between "full edit" and "no access".

5. No audit trail

The repair budget was $54k on Tuesday and $61k on Friday. Who changed it, and why? The sheet does not know, and neither do you.

The 70% rule: by hand vs by machine

The classic max-offer check is simple — ARV × 0.70 − repairs. By hand, on a real deal:

Easy once. Now do it for nine leads a week, then re-do it every time the ARV or the scope moves. In Rehabfolio the same figure — metrics.seventyRule — is computed automatically on every underwrite, and the flip calculator re-runs the full cost stack behind it:

The rule is the ceiling; the cost stack is the sanity check. A sheet can hold both — the difference is the machine recomputes them every time, from the same inputs, for everyone on the team.

What the workspace gives you instead

• Underwrite from a pasted listing — ARV, repairs, max offer, and risk flags drafted in about a minute, with a Web CMA evidence panel behind the numbers: sold comps, clickable source links, and tax/assessor data.
• One workspace as the source of truth — pipeline, budgets, tasks, files, and reports all read the same records. There is no v7.
• Real roles — owner, admin, member, viewer. Your GC can see the project without being able to edit your ARV.
• AI query history — every AI underwrite is logged with the provider that served it, and owners/admins can review the history. Drafts require your accept; nothing silent-writes to money fields.
• An audit trail — workspace activity is recorded, so "who changed the budget" has an answer.
• Public share links — send a project-update share link or the calendar feed to a partner or lender. They stay aligned without a seat, and without you exporting a PDF that is stale by Friday.

The honest exception

If you do one deal a year, alone, a spreadsheet is genuinely enough — keep it. The crossover point is when deal flow, partners, or a rehab crew mean more than one person needs the same number at the same time. That is when the sheet stops being a tool and starts being a rumor mill.