Beyond Spreadsheets: A Better Way to Manage FF&E Specifications

Spreadsheets have long played an important role in interior design practices. They are familiar, flexible and exceptionally useful for organising information.

For many design teams, they are also where FF&E schedules begin.

The difficulty comes as projects become larger, teams expand and specification information needs to do more than sit within a schedule. Product details change. Finishes are revised. Images and documents need to remain connected to individual items. Clients comment and approve. Reports are issued at different stages of the project.

At this point, the challenge is no longer simply recording information. It is FF&E specification management: keeping project information accurate, connected and controlled as the design develops.

For practices working across complex FF&E and finishes projects, there is an important distinction between a spreadsheet containing specification information and a specification management system built around that information.

When a spreadsheet becomes part of a much bigger system

Few practices deliberately create a complicated specification process.

It tends to develop gradually.

A spreadsheet contains the project schedule. Product images sit in project folders. Detailed specifications are produced separately. Supplier information is held elsewhere. PDFs are issued to clients. Comments and approvals arrive by email. Revised information is entered and new reports are created.

Individually, each part of the process works.

The problem is the relationship between them.

When a finish changes, how many places need to be updated? If an item is revised after a report has been issued, which information is current? If a client approved an earlier version, is that approval still relevant? And when a new schedule is required, does somebody need to assemble that information again?

The more disconnected the information becomes, the more time a practice has to spend maintaining the connections manually.

This is one of the fundamental limitations of spreadsheet-led specification management. The spreadsheet itself may work perfectly well. It simply has no inherent relationship with the other information and processes surrounding the specification.

Specification information should have one source

A typical FF&E specification can contain a substantial amount of information: product details, manufacturers, suppliers, dimensions, materials, finishes, quantities, locations, images, notes and supporting documents.

Much of that same information then appears elsewhere.

It may be presented in a detailed specification sheet, an FF&E schedule, a client approval document, a Design Intent report or another project output.

If each document is created independently, the practice is effectively maintaining several versions of the same information.

A more efficient approach is to maintain the specification information once and use it to create the outputs required by the project.

This changes the role of the specification.

Instead of being one document among many, it becomes the central source of project information from which different documents and reports can be produced.

The cost of entering the same information twice

Re-entering data is one of those tasks that rarely looks significant in isolation.

Copying a supplier name, finish reference or item description into another spreadsheet takes seconds.

Multiply those seconds across hundreds of specifications, numerous revisions, several project stages and multiple designers, however, and the administrative cost becomes much more significant.

There is also a second cost: every time information is copied manually, another opportunity for inconsistency is introduced.

The question therefore isn’t simply whether a team can create a schedule in Excel. Of course it can.

The more useful question is:

Should information that already exists within the specification need to be entered again to create that schedule?

Ideally, it shouldn’t.

Revisions change the equation

Specifications are rarely static.

Selections develop throughout a project. Products are replaced, materials change, dimensions are updated and client feedback leads to revisions.

Managing this process through documents and spreadsheets can become particularly challenging because every exported file represents the information as it existed at a particular point in time.

Once that file has been downloaded, emailed or saved elsewhere, it cannot automatically reflect subsequent changes.

This is where maintaining a central specification record becomes particularly valuable.

The working project information can continue to develop while formal outputs provide a record of what was issued at a particular stage.

The distinction between live project information and an issued document is important.

One needs to evolve.

The other may need to remain as a record of what was communicated at that time.

Collaboration requires more than file sharing

Cloud-based spreadsheets have made collaboration considerably easier. Multiple designers can work within the same file and changes can be seen without circulating new attachments.

But sharing access to a file is only one part of collaboration.

A professional specification workflow may also need to control:

• who can create or edit information;
• which specifications are ready to issue;
• what has been revised;
• which items have been approved;
• which information clients are able to see; and
• how project information is presented externally.

As teams become larger, this structure becomes increasingly valuable.

The objective isn’t to restrict designers unnecessarily. It is to give everyone working on the project confidence that they are using the correct information.

Client approvals shouldn’t become another disconnected record

Client approvals are a good example of how specification information can fragment.

A specification is issued. A PDF is emailed. Comments come back. An item is approved in an email response. Someone updates an approval column in a spreadsheet.

The process works — until somebody needs to establish exactly what was approved.

Approval is much more useful when it relates directly to the specification itself.

The project team can then see the status of an individual specification alongside the information being reviewed, rather than maintaining a separate record of decisions elsewhere.

This also makes it easier to manage revisions following approval. If an approved specification subsequently changes, the relationship between the specification, its status and its approval history becomes much clearer.

Templates create consistency without standardising design

Every interior design practice develops its own way of working.

Terminology, specification structures, standard notes and reporting conventions often form part of the practice’s accumulated knowledge.

That consistency is valuable.

But consistency shouldn’t mean forcing every product into an identical spreadsheet structure or limiting the way designers work.

Different specification types require different information. A piece of casegoods doesn’t need the same fields as a fabric, sanitaryware item or wall finish.

A structured template system allows a practice to establish what information should normally be captured for each type of specification while still allowing the project itself to remain flexible.

This can be particularly valuable when new designers join a practice or several team members work across the same project.

The system supports the practice’s standards without dictating the design.

Reporting should be an output, not a second exercise

Producing project documentation can consume a surprising amount of design-team time.

The issue is often not the information itself — that has already been created — but transforming it into the particular format required for a meeting, approval or issue.

If specification information is structured, the same underlying data can be used in different ways.

A detailed specification report might require images, dimensions, finishes and notes.

A schedule may need only item numbers, descriptions, locations, quantities and selected product information.

A client-facing document may require something different again.

These shouldn’t necessarily require three independently maintained sets of information.

The presentation changes; the underlying specification doesn’t.

This is one of the most significant differences between creating documents and managing specification data.

The spreadsheet isn’t really the problem

It is easy to frame this discussion as spreadsheets versus software, but that oversimplifies the issue.

Excel remains an exceptionally useful tool and there will always be situations in which a spreadsheet is exactly the right solution.

The real question is whether the method being used remains appropriate for the complexity of the project and the practice.

If a team is spending increasing amounts of time:

• copying information between files;
• checking which version is current;
• rebuilding schedules;
• locating images and supporting documents;
• reconciling client approvals;
• maintaining consistency across specifications; or
• manually formatting project reports,

then the specification workflow may simply have outgrown the tools originally used to manage it.

At that point, moving to a dedicated specification system isn’t about replacing spreadsheets for the sake of technology.

It is about removing unnecessary administration from the design process.

A specification should become more valuable as a project develops

One of the advantages of structured specification management is that the work put into creating a specification doesn’t disappear when a report is issued.

The information remains usable.

Specifications can contribute to schedules and reports. Images remain associated with the relevant items. Project information can be searched and filtered. Established specifications can inform future work. Templates and standard notes can preserve practice knowledge.

Over time, the information created by the design team becomes an asset rather than a collection of completed documents.

That is particularly important for established practices that may have years of specification knowledge distributed across historic project folders.

A better approach to FF&E specification management

Purpose-built specification software changes the emphasis from creating individual documents to managing the information behind those documents.

That doesn’t change the designer’s role.

Designers still select products, develop finishes, write specifications, coordinate requirements and make the decisions that define the project.

The software should simply provide a better structure in which to manage that work.

For a professional interior design practice, that means a system capable of supporting the complexity of real projects without adding complexity to the design process itself.

How Spec Designer approaches specification management

Spec Designer was developed specifically around the way professional interior design teams create and manage FF&E and finishes specifications.

Specifications, images, documents, suppliers and project information are held within a central project environment, allowing information to be managed once and used across different project outputs.

Structured templates and standard notes help practices maintain consistency, while revision management and client approvals provide greater control as projects develop.

Reports are created from the specification information already held within the system, reducing the need to recreate the same information in separate documents and spreadsheets.

The objective isn’t to change the way designers design.

It is to make the administration surrounding specification simpler, more consistent and easier to control.

If your practice is considering moving beyond spreadsheet-led specification management, book a demonstration to see how Spec Designer works.