Avise vs the spreadsheet you already have

A tracker in Excel or Google Sheets is the most widely used deal flow tool in the lower middle market, and it is not a joke or a stopgap. It costs nothing you are not already paying. Everyone on the team can use it without being taught. It bends to your process in an afternoon instead of a quarter. Most software sold into this market is worse than a good sheet.

We ran one for years. This product exists because of what it could not do, not because we thought sheets were beneath us.

What the sheet gets right

Be clear about this before anything else, because it is the part vendors skip. A sheet is the fastest way to answer what is in the pipeline and what stage is it at. It sorts, it filters, it does arithmetic, and any column you want exists the moment you type its name. For a list of deals and their stages, nothing beats it.

Nothing below is an argument that you should not be using a spreadsheet. It is an argument about the four jobs a spreadsheet cannot hold, and if those four jobs are not eating your week, you should stay where you are.

The four places it comes apart

The sheet is not where the documents are. The row says “Midwest HVAC, IOI sent”. The teaser is in an email from March, the CIM is in a Drive folder someone made, the NDA is a PDF in someone’s downloads, and the model is a file calledv4_FINAL_rev2.xlsx. The row is a pointer to four places, and the pointer is in your head. Every question about that deal costs a search.

There is no record of who was sent what. This is the one that eventually hurts. Six weeks after you shared a teaser with nine buyers, someone asks which of them saw the financials and which only got the one-pager. A sheet cannot answer that, because sending happened in email and the sheet was never told. The honest answer is usually a reconstruction from memory, and reconstructions are wrong.

Follow-up lives in a person, not the system. A sheet has no opinion about the seller you promised to call back on the 12th. You can add a column, and people do, and the column goes stale within a month because updating it is a separate act from doing the work. Deals do not usually die because someone decided against them. They die because a thread went quiet and nobody noticed for five weeks.

Two people, two versions of the truth. The moment a second person works the pipeline, the sheet forks: a local copy, a filtered view someone sorted and saved, a tab that only one person maintains. The question stops being “what is the status” and becomes “whose status is right”.

A spreadsheet is very good at holding a list. It cannot hold a document, a sending, a promise, or a second person, and deal flow is made of those.

Side by side

When you should stay on the sheet

We would rather say this here than on a call with you.

• You are one person. Most of what breaks above is a handoff problem. Alone, you are the system of record and you are a good one. Come back when you hire.
• You look at fewer than about ten deals a year. Below that, the friction is real but it is not expensive enough to be worth changing anything for.
• Your deals close in weeks. Nearly every failure above is a decay problem: things rot over months. A short cycle does not give them time to.
• Your sheet is genuinely current. If someone on your team keeps it honest and enjoys doing it, that is a real asset. Do not break it for a tool.

What moving actually costs

Import the sheet: the columns you have are the fields you get. Run one live deal through it end to end and judge it on whether that deal was easier, not on whether the software demoed well. If it was not, you have lost a week and still have the sheet, because we do not delete it and we do not lock your documents in.

The price is $249 a month per firm, whole team included, published in full on the pricing page. We do not count seats, so putting the whole team on it costs the same as putting one person on it, which matters, because a deal record that only one person updates is the problem you are trying to leave.