Stop retyping documents
Upload what your suppliers send. Senda reads the values and shows where each one came from on the page, so checking is a glance rather than a hunt.
Compare
Senda vs spreadsheets and email
Most trade teams run on a tracker spreadsheet, a shared drive and a long email thread. It works — until the same container number lives in four places and only one of them is right.
A spreadsheet is the right tool while one person handles every order. Senda is for the point where several people touch each shipment and nobody is sure which copy is current.
Where Senda earns its place
What you get that is hard to get elsewhere.
Two documents drafted for you
A commercial invoice from the order and a packing list from the shipment — built from what is already on file, with gaps marked rather than guessed.
Bring your sheet with you
Import existing customers and orders in bulk, and export them again whenever you like. Bulk import and export is on the Operations plan.
Side by side
Spreadsheets and email and Senda, row by row
How the work gets done in each, beside what Senda does.
Price
- Spreadsheets and email
- Their edgeFree, or close to it
- Senda
- Core $249/month for 5 users; Operations $599/month for 15 users. Enterprise is priced with you.
Getting started
- Spreadsheets and email
- Their edgeNothing to set up — everyone already knows it
- Senda
- We walk one of your real orders through Senda with you before anything is signed
Where the record lives
- Spreadsheets and email
- Split across sheets, inboxes and shared folders
- Senda
- One record per order and shipment, holding its containers, documents, comments and status history
Values on supplier PDFs
- Spreadsheets and email
- Retyped by hand
- Senda
- Read for you from PDFs, scans, Word and Excel files; each value points to where it sits on the page, and a person confirms it
Lumber tally sheets
- Spreadsheets and email
- Retyped into another sheet
- Senda
- Tally PDFs read and reviewed, then exported to Excel or PDF
Commercial invoice and packing list
- Spreadsheets and email
- Copied field by field into a template
- Senda
- Drafted from the order and shipment already on file; you review and send them
US duty and HS codes
- Spreadsheets and email
- Looked up on another site and pasted in
- Senda
- Estimated against the full US tariff schedule and kept on the shipment
Who changed what
- Spreadsheets and email
- File version history, when someone remembers to check it
- Senda
- Status history on every record, and an append-only audit log on Operations
Flexibility
- Spreadsheets and email
- Their edgeUnlimited — any column, any formula, today
- Senda
- Structured on purpose, so an unusual step in your process may still live in a side sheet
Which one to pick
Which one fits depends on the job.
Choose Senda if
- More than one person touches each order, and “which version is right?” comes up every week.
- Somebody retypes values from invoices, packing lists or tally sheets.
- Answering “where is that shipment, and what paperwork does it have?” means searching three inboxes.
Choose Spreadsheets and email if
- You ship a handful of orders a month and one person handles every one of them end to end.
- Your process changes week to week and you need to rearrange it yourself, this afternoon, without asking anyone.
- Budget is the constraint that matters most right now. A spreadsheet costs nothing, and that is a real advantage.
What moving off a spreadsheet actually involves
You do not have to move everything at once. Most teams start with the orders and shipments in flight, and keep the old sheet read-only for history until they stop opening it.
The part that changes day to day is paperwork. Instead of opening a PDF in one window and typing into a sheet in another, you upload the document to the shipment it belongs to and confirm the values Senda read from it.
Anything Senda does not model can stay where it is. We would rather you keep a side sheet for one odd step than bend your process to fit the software.
Questions
What people ask us.
Can we import our existing spreadsheet?
Yes. Customers and orders can be imported in bulk from a file, and exported again at any time. Bulk import and export is part of the Operations plan, and we walk the first import with you.
Is Senda harder to use than a spreadsheet?
It is more structured, which is the point: every order has the same shape, so anyone on the team can find what they need. The trade-off is flexibility — a spreadsheet will always let you add a column faster.
How much does it cost compared with a spreadsheet?
A spreadsheet is close to free. Senda's Core plan is $249/month for 5 users, and Operations is $599/month for 15 users. The question is whether the hours spent retyping and reconciling cost more than that — the workflow review is where we work that out with you.
Start with your real workflow
See it on one of your own orders.
Tell us how your team works today. We walk one real order-to-shipment workflow with you — and tell you plainly if another tool on this page is the better fit.
Where this comparison comes from
Senda's side of this page describes what ships today; anything on the roadmap is labelled as such on the FAQ.