Daily strip shows
Game shows, talk shows, court shows. 150–195 episodes a season, taped in blocks, aired across weeks. The single strongest fit: the volume is what breaks a spreadsheet, and tape-day-to-broadcast-week is already modelled.
Who it is for
Built for shows that make a lot of episodes
High-volume unscripted television — shows cutting and delivering dozens to hundreds of episodes a season with a small post team.
Weekly unscripted series
Competition, reality, magazine and entertainment-news formats. 13–40 episodes, repeating package types, and a delivery list that fans out to more than one destination.
Shows with variants
Anything producing an ALT, INTL or network-specific cut alongside the main one. The clearance rules on a variant are where a spreadsheet quietly gets something wrong.
Production companies running several shows
Two or more shows with different cadences under one post team. Each show is settings rather than a separate system, so the second show costs setup time, not a new rollout.
The actual dividing line
It is about episode count, not budget
A ten-episode show does not need this. A spreadsheet genuinely works at that size, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling.
The trouble starts when three things happen at once: you have more episodes than anybody can hold in their head, packages that get reused across them, and a delivery list that goes to more than one place. At that point the spreadsheet stops being a tracker and becomes a second job — and it still cannot answer the one question that matters most, which is if this package changes, which episodes are affected?
Who actually uses it
Five people, three different reasons
Post Supervisor
Champion, and the heaviest userTo stop being the human router. They are the person everyone interrupts to ask where something is, and they carry the answer in their head and in a spreadsheet only they fully understand.
Post Coordinator
The person maintaining the spreadsheets todayThe status chase to end. Most of the day goes on asking people for updates and retyping the answers into a tracker.
Post Producer
Usually the economic buyerNo missed deliveries and no surprises near air. Cares about the audit trail when something goes wrong.
Lead AE / Assistant Editor
Daily user, deliverables and mediaA delivery list that shows what is genuinely blocked versus merely late, and not to be asked for the same file twice.
Editor
Light user, and the one to not annoyTo be told what is theirs and then left alone. Will abandon anything that asks them to maintain a status.
The editor row is the one that decides whether this survives. Anything that asks an editor to maintain a status gets abandoned in the first week, which is why nothing here does.
When shows actually switch
Nobody changes how they work mid-season for fun
- A new season pickup, when the tracker is rebuilt from scratch anyway
- A missed delivery, a recall, or a compliance note that reached air
- The post supervisor leaves and takes the spreadsheet knowledge with them
- Adding a second show, or a variant with different clearance rules
- Post going remote or hybrid, where hallway answers stop working
Being straight about it
Who this is not for
Written down because the fastest way to waste everybody’s time is a walkthrough for a show this was never going to fit.
Scripted prestige drama with a short order
Eight to ten episodes over a long schedule. A spreadsheet genuinely does work at that volume, and the package-reuse model has nothing to bite on.
Feature film post
One deliverable, one long schedule. The whole model here is repetition.
Studios already running an enterprise media supply chain
If there is already a full media supply chain platform and the budget for it, this overlaps rather than fills a gap.
A post team of one or two
Coordination software solves handoffs between people. With nobody to hand off to, there is nothing to fix.
Live and daily news
A different cadence entirely, and the stage model does not describe it.
Sound like your show?
Open the demo and see whether the board matches how your season actually runs. If it does not, say so on a call and we will tell you straight.
Walkthroughs are with Kevin Kelsey — 15 years an assistant editor, Children's & Family Emmy-nominated, and the person who built this. More about him.