Tracking customs: spreadsheet, Notion, or a real tracker?

An honest comparison from My Customs

A spreadsheet is fine when…

Let's be fair to the spreadsheet: it's free, you already know how it works, and for a handful of customs a month it's genuinely enough. If you sell two or three customs at a time, always to the same few fans, and you work mostly from a desktop — a Google Sheet with the right columns will serve you well. Plenty of creators run exactly that.

The free template (steal these columns)

If you're going the spreadsheet route, don't reinvent it. These eight columns cover a custom completely — the reasoning behind each is in the tracking guide:

Column	What goes in it
Fan	Their name on the platform where they asked
Platform	OnlyFans, Fansly, ManyVids, Telegram…
Details	What they asked for, in their exact words
Price	The agreed total
Paid so far	Every payment added up — deposits and tips count
Due	The delivery date (never leave it blank)
Status	Lead / Active / Completed
Chat link	A link back to the conversation it was sold in

Copy that row of headers into Google Sheets and you have a working customs tracker. Really. If it holds up for you, keep it.

Where the spreadsheet breaks

In practice, it breaks in the same five places for almost everyone:

The payment math is on you. "Paid so far" is one cell — so a deposit, a tip and a settle-up become mental arithmetic, or a formula that silently breaks the day you sort the rows. There's no log of what arrived when.
Phones hate spreadsheets. Customs get sold in DMs, which get read on a phone. Pinch-zooming into cell F17 to update a balance mid-conversation is where most sheets quietly die.
Statuses are just text. Nothing moves anywhere, nothing gets louder as a due date approaches, and "overdue" doesn't exist unless you build conditional formatting.
Sharing means surrendering. Give an assistant the sheet and they can see — and break — everything. There are no separate logins, no author on any change.
It never reminds you. A spreadsheet doesn't tap you on the shoulder the morning something is due. It waits to be opened, and busy weeks are exactly when it isn't.

What about Notion or Airtable?

Notion and Airtable templates are a real step up — proper databases, views, filters. Two honest caveats. First, the learning curve: you're not setting up a tracker, you're learning a database product, and the template marketplace ones usually track far more than customs (content calendars, subscriber CRMs, chat scripts) — impressive on day one, abandoned by month two. Second, they're still generic: partial-payment balances, an overdue view, and a link-back-to-the-chat field all exist only if you build and maintain them yourself.

Side by side

	Spreadsheet	Notion / Airtable	My Customs
Cost	Free	Free–paid	Free
Setup	Minutes	Hours (honest)	Minutes
Payment log with running balance	Manual formula	Build it yourself	Built in
Works well on a phone	Poorly	Okay	Yes — add it to your home screen
Overdue stands out by itself	No	If you build it	Yes
Assistant with own login	No	Paid tiers	Yes
Daily reminder to your phone	No	No	Yes
Link back to the chat	A cell, if you add it	A field, if you add it	On every custom

The honest pitch: My Customs is the eight columns above, already built, quick on a phone, with the payment math done for you. Free, and the demo has sample data you can click around in before making an account.

Try the demo — no account needed

Selling mostly on OnlyFans or Fansly? There's a guide to tracking customs on those platforms specifically. And if anything here raised questions, the FAQ is short and straight.