SimpleRef vs Spreadsheets: A Side-by-Side Comparison for Specialist Practices

Most specialist practices in Australia track referrals in a spreadsheet. It is the default: a Google Sheet, a few column headers, done in ten minutes.

SimpleRef does the same job. It tracks a referral from the moment it arrives to the moment the patient is booked. The difference is that it is built for that one job and nothing else. Here is how the two compare on a Tuesday morning, when the receptionist has fifteen things to do and a patient on the phone.

Where spreadsheets genuinely win

Pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Spreadsheets are free if you already pay for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, and they need no training, so a new receptionist can start on day one. They are endlessly flexible too: want a column for the referring GP’s mobile? Type a header. Excel also works with no internet at all, which matters on an unreliable connection.

For a solo specialist with a light, orderly referral load, that is a good tool honestly used. Our broader look at where a spreadsheet stops holding is worth reading alongside this.

The one thing underneath all of it

A spreadsheet cannot remind anyone. A row that should have been chased last Thursday looks exactly like a row that is fine, so the practice’s safety net is a person’s memory. That is the mechanism behind most referrals that quietly go nowhere.

Every line in the comparison above follows from that. The queue is only visible if somebody scrolls and reconstructs it. The KPIs worth watching stay a pivot-table project that gets postponed until someone asks. And contacting patients stays a separate chore, where in SimpleRef the saved message templates send from the referral itself. Sending sits inside the workflow rather than beside it.

The cost comparison

$299 a month including GST is $3,588 a year. A spreadsheet is free. On that line alone the spreadsheet wins, and it is the wrong line to look at.

A referral that is never actioned does not cost one consultation fee. It costs the follow-ups, any procedure, the ongoing management, and some of the GP relationship that sent it. We set out what one lost referral is actually worth separately. For scale: a systematic review in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found only 35% of specialty referrals result in a documented visit. Not all of that gap is administrative. The administrative part is the part your practice controls.

So the honest question is not whether you can afford the software, but how many saved referrals a month it would take to pay for itself. The referral leakage calculator takes about two minutes.

If you are staying put for now, our referral tracking guide sets out a framework that works fine in a spreadsheet.

Making the switch

It is not a dramatic migration. You are still moving referrals through stages from received to booked, and the system just holds the parts people forget. Setup is a conversation, not a configuration screen. Tell us how your practice triages (who sees what first, what “waiting on the patient” means to you) and we build those stages into your board. There is little to learn after that, because the workflow is the one your team already knows by heart. The feature list and pricing are both public.

Two things worth knowing before you decide. Patient records are hosted in Australia, but billing is processed by Stripe, which operates offshore, and when someone uploads a document to AI Intake it is sent to Google’s AI service for extraction, which is not hosted in Australia. AI Intake is included in every plan and is part of how the product works; nothing goes to Google unless a document is uploaded.

Two questions we get

Isn’t our practice management system already doing this? It records that a referral exists and files the document. What it generally will not do is tell you which referrals are stalled, and at which step. That distinction is the whole subject of PMS versus dedicated referral management, and it is worth settling before you compare prices.

What happens to the old spreadsheet? Nothing has to happen to it. Closed referrals can stay where they are as an archive. Only the open ones need somewhere better to live, and there are usually far fewer of those than the file’s row count suggests. The simplest approach is to move them across as you touch each one, rather than in a single sitting.

The best next step is a look, not a signup. Ask for a twenty-minute walkthrough and we will put your kind of referrals on the board, or start a 14-day free trial and try it against your current sheet.