I first came across this sort of advice here:

The Montana Mogul: RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte (Part 1)

http://www.sramanamitra.com/2008/07/31/the-montana-mogul-rig...

Interesting story. RightNow was later sold to Oracle, IIRC, for a good amount.

Greg used a similar technique to what you advise.

In wine business thats quite complex thing: you might want to sell bulk wine, you might blend different stock together or bottle one lot in multiple times. There is strict requirements by govt about declaration of those thing. Each country qlso have different requirements and reporting formats.

Got a few hundred users but no real traction yet :-/

Still 'beta' but you can signup under /signup/ Please share feedback :)

It pays its way, but at a huge cost of time spent on support and maintenance. When non-trivial feature requests come in, we can't feasibly drop everything else for long enough to implement it. We signal this by asking the customer to pay a lot (compared to our SaaS subscription price). Usually this dissuades them.

Every so often, we lose a customer -> support dies down -> we can add some real direction and features to the product -> we gain more customers -> we get swamped under support and maintenance. The cycle continues. I don't know what the solution is.

With spreadsheets, the customer can always fall back to cobbling together a new report or visualization by themselves.

Say you are tracking work done in vineyard, but nothing else. Then your calculation of price of produce is off, because you havent add the price of input. There are multiple roles in the company and they are usualy using they own systems for reporting.

Also quite a lot of production tracking have to be done on paper using special notepad with marked pages (another funny story) and people dont want to do this bookkeeping twice.