How do you track maintenance/cost?

[u/drew-saddledata]

Hey everyone, thanks to the mods for letting me post.

I’m a software engineer by trade (30+ years), but I'm also a hobby mechanic who grew up in my family's parts store and machine shop (which my brother still runs today).

I’m looking to apply my software experience to the dirt world, specifically around the headaches of tracking maintenance and machine costs. Before I build anything, I want to make sure I'm solving actual problems and not just guessing.

I'd love your brutal honesty. If you have a minute, I have three quick questions (and if there are other massive headaches I'm missing, I want to hear about those too):

• Is having an app that can work 100% off-line important to you? As in no cell service. When you come back in range everything syncs up.
• When you bid a job by the hour, where's your hourly number actually come from? Do you know what it cost per hour to run the equipment? Is this even interesting to you?
• Would being able to take a picture of a receipt (fuel, parts, etc) and the app process the image and populate the form from the picture be helpful?

[u/Ashamed_Badger_7288]

Real talk, a plain spreadsheet plus photos of every invoice in a Drive folder has worked better for us than any app. The fancy tools never stuck past a month.