Free Commission Tracker: Google Sheets vs App

The best free commission tracker for most makers is a four-tab Google Sheets file: a queue, a payment log, a materials log, and a dashboard. Below is the exact template I run, with every column, status, and formula, so you can build it in about twenty minutes. Further down is the honest part: the specific point where an app beats the sheet, and what to switch to when you hit it.

Some context on why I'm opinionated about this. My first commission spreadsheet had six columns: client, character, price, deposit, status, notes. It tracked four fursuit partials and a couple of prop builds and it worked fine. Eighteen months later it had 847 rows, 14 tabs, and a VLOOKUP I was scared to touch. I lost track of a $3,000 full suit for two weeks because a filter I'd forgotten about was hiding the client's row. The fix wasn't abandoning spreadsheets. It was rebuilding the sheet around one rule: money goes in a log, never in a cell you overwrite.

Spreadsheet template or app: the short answer

Use the spreadsheet template if you have fewer than about ten active commissions, you're the only person who looks at the tracker, and your clients are happy with status updates by DM. Use an app once you need any of these: a client-facing progress view, approvals with timestamps, reminders that fire without you opening the file, or a tracker that works on your phone with glue on your hands.

If you're somewhere in between, there's a middle step. Costumary's free commission tracker runs in the browser with no account, gives you a five-stage pipeline with the balance owed on each card, and exports to CSV that opens straight into Sheets. I'll come back to where each option breaks.

The free Google Sheets commission tracker template

The template has four tabs. Name them exactly as written, because the formulas reference them by name.

• Queue: one row per commission. This is the tab you live in.
• Payments: one row per payment received. Deposits, installments, finals, refunds.
• Materials: one row per purchase tied to a commission.
• Dashboard: totals and a sorted "what's due next" list. You never type in this tab.

The split matters. The single most common way spreadsheet trackers lose money is a "Deposit paid: Yes" cell that someone (you, at 1 AM during con crunch) flips to "Paid in full" by mistake. A payment log can't drift like that, because the paid total is always calculated from actual payment rows.

Queue tab columns

Put these headers in row 1, columns A through O. Row 2 holds the first commission and the formulas; drag them down as you add rows.

Format F through J as currency and K and M as dates. Freeze row 1 and column B so the client name stays visible when you scroll right on a laptop screen.

Margin is deliberately simple. It ignores your hours, which is the number most makers underprice. If the margin column looks fine but you still feel broke, run the quote through the commission pricing calculator and compare its labor line to what you actually charged.

The status list

Select column E, then Insert, Dropdown, and type these values in order. Google's dropdown menu also has preset chips for "Project status," but the presets don't match commission stages, so build your own.

Two rules keep this list honest. A row only moves to Booked when a deposit is in the Payments tab, which stops you starting work on a promise. And On hold always gets a Last contact date, so you can see which clients have gone quiet.

Payments tab

Headers: Date, ID, Amount, Method, Type, Note. Method is a dropdown (PayPal, Stripe invoice, Ko-fi, bank transfer, cash). Type is a dropdown (Deposit, Installment, Final, Refund). Enter refunds as negative amounts so every SUMIFS stays correct without special cases.

This tab is the one I'd keep even if you switch to an app later. At tax time you want every payment in one dated list, and a filter on Date does that in seconds. For the payment-plan side of this (installments, late balances, what to do when a client stops paying), the commission payment tracking guide goes deeper.

Materials tab

Headers: Date, ID, Item, Supplier, Cost. Log purchases the day you make them, from the receipt or order email. Shared supplies (a gallon of contact cement, a roll of minky) go in with ID "SHOP" so they don't distort a single commission's margin but still show up in your yearly costs.

Dashboard tab

Four formulas cover what you actually need to know at a glance.

Money owed to you on booked work:

=SUMIFS(Queue!H2:H,Queue!E2:E,"<>Inquiry",Queue!E2:E,"<>Quoted",Queue!E2:E,"<>Waitlist",Queue!E2:E,"<>Cancelled")

Cash received this month:

=SUMIFS(Payments!C:C,Payments!A:A,">="&(EOMONTH(TODAY(),-1)+1),Payments!A:A,"<="&EOMONTH(TODAY(),0))

Active builds:

=COUNTIF(Queue!E2:E,"Booked")+COUNTIF(Queue!E2:E,"In progress")+COUNTIF(Queue!E2:E,"On hold")

Everything due, soonest first (put this in an empty cell with room below it):

=SORT(FILTER(Queue!A2:L,Queue!L2:L<>""),12,TRUE)

That last one lists every unshipped commission with a due date, sorted by days left. It's the closest a spreadsheet gets to a queue view. I tested the core formulas with dummy rows before publishing this; if one returns an error in your copy, check that your tab names match exactly, including capitals.

Conditional formatting rules

Select A2:O on the Queue tab, then Format, Conditional formatting, and add each rule with "Custom formula is." Order matters: Sheets applies the first rule that's true, so keep them in this sequence.

1. Overdue (red fill): =AND($L2<>"",$L2<0)
2. Due within a week (amber fill): =AND($L2<>"",$L2<=7)
3. Shipped but not paid off (purple fill): =AND($E2="Shipped",$H2>0)
4. Client quiet for two weeks (grey text): =AND($E2="On hold",$M2<>"",TODAY()-$M2>14)

The dollar sign before the column letter is what makes the whole row light up instead of one cell. Rule 3 is the one that has saved me real money. It catches the build that went out the door before the final payment landed.

Setting it up in twenty minutes

1. Create a new spreadsheet and rename the first tab Queue. Add Payments, Materials, and Dashboard tabs.
2. Paste the Queue headers into row 1 and the four formulas into G2, H2, I2, J2, and L2.
3. Add the status dropdown to E2:E and the method and type dropdowns on Payments.
4. Paste the dashboard formulas.
5. Add the four conditional formatting rules.
6. Enter one real commission end to end: queue row, deposit row, one materials row. If the balance and margin look right, drag the row 2 formulas down 200 rows and you're done.

What the spreadsheet does well

It's free with any personal Google account, and you're not going to outgrow its size. Google's documented ceiling is 20 million cells per spreadsheet. A personal account comes with 15 GB of storage shared across Drive, Gmail, and Photos, and a commission tracker uses a rounding error of that.

It also does money math better than most visual tools. Trello and most Notion setups make you work to get an accurate outstanding balance across the whole queue; the dashboard formula above does it in one cell. And you control every column. If you're a fursuit maker who needs a "fur ordered" date or a sewist who wants a "measurements received" checkbox, you add it in ten seconds.

Monthly Cost: Sheets Template vs Commission Apps

costumary.com

Sheets (personal)$0/mo

Workspace Starter$7/mo

Costumary free tracker$0/mo

Costumary Studio$19/mo

You only need Google Workspace (Business Starter lists at $7 per user per month on an annual plan) if you want a custom-domain email. The tracker works the same without it.

Where an app beats a spreadsheet

Here's the honest line. The sheet is better than an app until you need the tracker to act on its own or show something to someone else. Below are the specific breaks, in the order most makers hit them.

It only tells you things when you open it

Sheets can email you, but only about edits and comments other people make to the file. It has no idea a deposit is a week late or a due date is close unless you open the tab and look at the red rows. In a normal week that's fine. In con crunch, "open the spreadsheet" is the first habit to go, and that's exactly when deadlines slip.

You can bolt on Google Apps Script to send yourself reminder emails. I did. Then I was maintaining a spreadsheet plus a script, and when the script broke I didn't notice for a month, because the thing that would have told me was the script.

Clients can't safely see their own row

Clients ask "how's my commission going?" constantly, and the sheet has no good answer. Sharing works on the whole file, not a tab. Hiding the other tabs doesn't help: Google's own help page says viewers can still access content in hidden sheets, and that protecting a sheet "shouldn't be used as a security measure." Share your tracker with one client and they can see every other client's name, price, and balance.

The workarounds are a separate status file per client (now you update two places) or copy-pasting updates into DMs. Both cost time on every update. This is usually the first break for fursuit and cosplay commissions, where a build runs for months and the client wants to see the foam base, the fur layout, and the paint before signing off.

Approvals are a cell you typed yourself

When a client approves a color or a head shape, the sheet records whatever you typed into the Next action column. There's no timestamp from the client and no photo attached to what they approved. If someone disputes an approval three weeks later, your evidence is your own note. A tool with approval gates gives you a dated client sign-off on a specific WIP photo, which is a different kind of evidence.

The breakpoint in numbers

From my own queue and the makers I've compared notes with, the sheet stops paying for itself somewhere around ten active commissions, or the moment you can't answer "how much am I owed right now?" in ten seconds. The time cost is real too. In my last three months on the old sheet I logged how long upkeep took and it came to about three hours a week, mostly reconciling payments and fixing formatting.

The free tracker as a middle step

Before paying for anything, try the free commission tracker on Costumary. Full disclosure: it's our tool. It's built for the person who wants a pipeline view without building formulas. Five columns (Inquiry, Accepted, In Progress, Shipped, Paid), one click to move a card forward, the balance owed on every card, and running totals for earned and pending money.

Its limits are real and worth knowing before you rely on it. It stores everything in your browser, so it only lives on the device you used, and clearing site data wipes it. There's no client view and no file storage. Use the CSV export as your backup; it opens directly in Google Sheets, so you can paste the rows into the Queue tab above if you decide the spreadsheet suits you better.

When you need the client side (intake forms, quotes, approval gates, a client portal without a client account), that's Costumary Studio at $19 a month with a 30-day free trial, and the commission workflow page shows how it fits together. Starter accounts get their first commission on the full workflow for free. If you want to compare Studio against Trello, Notion, VGen, and the artist-specific trackers before deciding, the commission tracker apps comparison covers each with verified 2026 prices, and the Notion commission tracker breakdown covers the template route on Notion specifically.

Who should stay on the spreadsheet

Stay on the sheet if you take fewer than ten commissions at a time, most are one payment and one delivery, your clients don't need to see progress, or you just like building spreadsheets (some people do, and it's a fine hobby). Also stay if you're testing whether commissions are worth it at all. Twenty minutes of setup is the right investment for an experiment.

Switch when the sheet starts asking you for time instead of saving it: when you're running Sheets plus a Drive folder plus DMs plus PayPal to answer one client question, you've outgrown it. Keep the Payments tab either way. It's the cleanest tax record you'll have.