ProLens vs Excel Tracking

Most growing A/E firms run on a small constellation of spreadsheets: the partner's revenue tracker, the bookkeeper's AR aging, the project manager's burn report. Each is correct for ten minutes after refresh and then quietly drifts. The cost is not the licenses; it is the hours every Monday morning reconciling four versions of the same number.

The spreadsheet stack

A typical firm has:

• One "master" project tracker with budget, fee, hours-to-date
• An AR aging spreadsheet exported from accounting weekly
• A pipeline tracker (sometimes a CRM, sometimes a Google Sheet)
• A utilization report exported from the PSA monthly
• One Slack thread asking which version is current

Every number requires a person to pull, paste, and refresh. Numbers disagree because exports happen at different times.

What ProLens replaces

What you keep

You keep your PSA. ProLens reads from it; you continue entering projects, time, and invoices the way you always have. The dashboard is a layer on top, not a replacement.

What you gain

• One source of truth. Every widget pulls from your PSA on a 15-minute cycle. No more "the bookkeeper's number is different."
• A daily AI briefing. Each domain gets a one-line narrative every morning identifying the most important thing to act on today.
• Read-only safety. ProLens never writes back to your PSA, so the worst case is a blank dashboard, not corrupted records.

What stays in spreadsheets

ProLens is not a CRM, accounting system, or PSA. If you build custom ad-hoc models (e.g., a fee proposal spreadsheet, a what-if scenario for a new hire), those still live in Excel or Google Sheets.