Yven vs a spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is free and works well for a handful of sites. It stops working when renewals are missed because nobody opened it, or when small jobs never reach an invoice. If that has happened twice, move the sheet into a tool that reminds you and bills the work.
By Darren Harkness, founder of Yven. Published 13 October 2026. Last reviewed 13 October 2026.
I make Yven (Your View of Everything Necessary), so weigh this page accordingly. I have tried to say plainly where the sheet is the better choice, because for some shops it is.
Where a spreadsheet is the better tool
A spreadsheet costs nothing, opens offline, and holds whatever columns you invent. There is no account to create and no vendor to depend on, and the file is yours. If you look after a handful of sites and you open the sheet every week, it will keep up. The free template exists for exactly that shop, and I would rather you use it well than outgrow it early. A sheet is also the better place to work out what you want to track: rename a column, add a tab, throw the whole thing away, and nothing else breaks.
Where it starts to fail
Nobody opens it
A sheet only tells you something when you open it. The renewal that matters is the one on a client’s domain, and it comes due in a week you never opened the file. The template helps: its Renewal radar tab sorts by what expires soonest and colours the overdue dates. You still have to look.
Yven watches every service that has a renewal date and sends one email at 8am your time. Anything overdue appears every morning until you deal with it, and upcoming renewals appear on your reminder lead days, which default to 60, 30, 14, 7 and 1 days out. Read how the renewal digest decides what to send.
It also fills in the date. Add a domain and Yven can look up its registration expiry, so you are not copying dates out of a registrar dashboard. Some domains do not publish an expiry. When that happens you type the date in, exactly as you would in a sheet.
Nobody knows whose job it is
The column most sheets lack is who pays. A domain the client pays for directly, one you rebill at a markup, and one you absorb all behave differently when the renewal arrives. Yven keeps that on the service, so a renewal tells you whose job it is. Mark a rebilled service renewed and the charge lands on the client’s next invoice at your markup.
Small jobs never reach an invoice
“Can you just swap this image?” takes ten minutes, so it gets no row in a client sheet and nobody writes it down. An Ignition survey of 223 US agencies (May 2023) found that only 7% say they always bill out-of-scope work. A spreadsheet does not cause that, but it has nowhere to put the work either.
In Yven, press W anywhere, write one line, and the entry is in the work log. Billable entries that have not been invoiced wait as money, and you batch them with any rebilled renewal fees into one invoice you can print or save as a PDF.
Side by side
| The job | A spreadsheet | Yven |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | A paid plan, shown under pricing |
| Reminders | Sorting and colour, if you open the file | One email at 8am your time |
| Renewal dates | You type them | Filled in by the domain expiry lookup when the registry publishes one |
| Who manages, who pays | A column you name yourself | Managed by (me, client, third party) and Paid by (me rebilled, me absorbed, client direct) on every service |
| Logins | Easy to paste into a cell | A login pointer such as “1Password › Bakery vault”, never the password |
| Small jobs | No natural place | The work log, one keypress away |
| Invoicing | Retyped into your invoicing tool | Logged work and renewal fees batched into one invoice |
| Showing the client | A status email | A private link to the work you choose to share |
| Your data | Yours, always | Exported from Settings at any time |
| Team | Share the file | One account for one shop, no roles |
A worked example
This is an illustration, not a statistic. Say you do six ten-minute jobs for clients in a month: an image swap, a footer link, a new address on a contact form. At CA$90 an hour, that is one hour and CA$90 a month, or CA$1,080 a year. No single job is big enough to remember, which is why it only gets billed when something captures it at the moment it happens. Use your own rate and your own count.
What moving looks like
Export the Client Book tab of the free template as CSV, or map the columns of your own sheet. The importer has four steps: upload, map columns, preview, import. The preview shows what will be created and which rows will be skipped, with the reason, before anything is written. Skipped rows download as their own CSV, so you can fix them and re-import without duplicating clients.
If you are not sure what belongs in the book, what to record for every client site lists the fields. One row describes one service for one client. A client with three services appears on three rows. Fill in the renewal date on every row you can: a service with no date imports fine, but nothing watches it.
What Yven does not do
It is a paid product, built for one person’s shop rather than a team with roles. It does not check whether your sites are up, so use a monitor for that. It does not store passwords. It does not renew anything for you: it tells you early, and records the renewal when you mark it done.
How to decide
Keep the sheet if renewals and small jobs are both under control and you open it every week. Move if a renewal slipped on a client site, or a small job went unbilled, twice. Either way the template is free, and its Client Book tab imports into Yven whenever you are ready.