Productivity templates

The software a small operation never gets round to buying

Every small business and every solo operator accumulates a set of things that ought to be tracked and are not quite worth a product. Who enquired and when you last replied. Which quotes are outstanding. What each client is owed and by when. Which of the eleven jobs on this month's list are actually finished. What stock is left. What the van needs servicing.

The reason these stay untracked is not laziness. It is that each of them is a tenth of a real product, and buying ten real products to cover ten tenths is absurd both in money and in the attention it takes to keep ten systems current. So the work goes into a notebook, a phone's notes app and one person's memory, and it mostly holds until the day it does not.

The jobs in this category

Lead and enquiry tracking is the most valuable, because the cost of dropping one is direct and invisible. Job or project boards come next: a small set of live jobs with a status and an owner, which is the entire useful part of every project tool for an operation of three people. Then quoting and invoicing state, client records, a simple stock or inventory count, and a shift or rota board.

Underneath all of them sits the same shape, which is a list of things with a status, a person and a date, viewed by more than one person. That shape is why the category is worth having: once you can build it in a conversation, the eleventh tenth-of-a-product becomes worth building.

Spreadsheets, group chats, and the CRM nobody logged into twice

The default is a spreadsheet, and for a single operator it is genuinely fine. It stops being fine at two people, because a spreadsheet has no notion of who may change what, no record of who changed it, and no sensible mobile use, and the person out on a job is the person who most needs to update it.

The next attempt is usually a real CRM or project tool, and the failure there is well known: a fortnight of enthusiastic setup, a pricing tier that assumes a sales team, forty fields nobody fills in, and a quiet return to the spreadsheet by week five. The tool was not bad. It was built for an organisation with a person whose job is keeping the tool current, and a business of three people does not have that person and should not hire one.

What an AI-built internal tool looks like

It looks small. One list, four fields, the statuses your business actually uses rather than a pipeline somebody else designed, and no configuration screen because there is nothing to configure. It takes a conversation to make, so it can be exactly as narrow as the job, and it can be thrown away when the job changes.

The multi-person part is where it earns its place over a spreadsheet. Each person you invite by email gets their own sign-in, the app records who changed what, and a template can say plainly that a member may add and update but not delete. Changes appear live, so the person in the office and the person on site are looking at the same board.

And because your AI holds the same data, the tedious half moves: adding the enquiry that just came in, chasing what has gone quiet, telling you which quotes are still open, then widening the app when the business needs a field it did not have. Adding to an app never destroys the rows already in it, and a redeploy that would narrow the app is refused rather than silently applied.

Where to start in this category

The templates listed on this page are published by the Homespun community, so what is here changes as people share what they built. If none of them is your shape, that is the normal case rather than a failure: describe the list you are keeping in a notebook and let your AI build it, then publish it back here if it turns out to be useful to somebody else.

For the shape of what a well-built one looks like, the Chore Board in household templates is the clearest example of the pattern (a list with a status and an owner, a role rule about who may delete, and an append-only audit trail alongside), just pointed at a household rather than a business. Installing anything needs a Homespun account, and every install is private by default.

What to check before you run a business on one

The ceilings are generous for a small operation and worth knowing before you commit: an app holds up to a hundred thousand rows, thirty two lists and a gigabyte of data, an account holds up to a hundred apps, and an individual file attachment is capped at five megabytes for a document or image. If your business genuinely needs more than that, this is the wrong tool and the right answer is a real product.

Two gaps matter more than the ceilings. There is no CSV export today: your AI can read every row back, and the command line tool prints JSON, but a spreadsheet download does not exist yet. And nothing here is an accounting system, so it will not do VAT, produce a compliant invoice or satisfy a bookkeeper. It is the layer above the notebook and below the accounts package.

What it does give you that a spreadsheet cannot is a real multi-person surface: per-person sign-in by email link, rules about who may change what enforced by the server rather than by convention, an author recorded on every row, and changes appearing live for everybody with the page open. For a team of two to five that is usually the whole gap.