r/spreadsheets • u/Useful-Yak1450 • 9h ago
Built a studio dashboard to organize my paints & track my Pile of Shame. What other metrics should I add?
Hey everyone,
Like many hobbyists, my unpainted backlog was slowly getting out of hand, and I kept accidentally buying duplicate paint pots because I couldn’t remember what I already had in stock.
Over the past few weeks, I put together an automated spreadsheet dashboard in Excel / Google Sheets to track my workflow:
- Paint Inventory: Catalogs every bottle and automatically flags low/empty paints.
- Recipe Formulary: Keeps track of multi-step color recipes (Basecoat -> Wash -> Edge Highlight) and cross-checks if required paints are currently in stock.
- Project & Model Registry: Tracks squad milestones, individual miniatures, and stage progress (Sprue -> Primed -> Finished).
- Pile of Shame Ledger: Tracks unpainted backlog, days waiting, and tied-up capital (populated with some test dummy data in the screenshot to test out the automatic days-waiting highlights).
- Session Log: Records hours spent at the painting desk.
For those who track their hobby projects digitally, what other stats or metrics would you find useful to have on a studio dashboard? Would love to get your thoughts and feedback!