Jurying without the spreadsheet
Why side-by-side review beats a tracking sheet for artisan market jurying, and what to keep from the spreadsheet you are replacing.
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Nearly every organizer we talk to runs jurying out of a spreadsheet. It is usually a good spreadsheet. It has been refined over several seasons, it has conditional formatting nobody remembers writing, and it works right up until two people need to use it in the same week.
The part the spreadsheet gets right
It is worth being honest about this. The spreadsheet is a single surface where you can see every applicant at once, sort them, and make a call. That is the core of jurying, and any tool that replaces it has to be at least as fast to scan.
The part it gets wrong
The spreadsheet is a copy. The real applications live in a form tool, the photos live in a shared drive, and the emails live in yet another place. Every row in the sheet is a small act of transcription, and transcription is where the errors are.
The second problem is that a spreadsheet has no memory of why. Six weeks after the season opens, when a vendor asks why they were not accepted, the sheet shows a score and nothing else.
What side-by-side review looks like
In Trestle, jurying happens on the applications themselves. You see the submitted answers and the vendor’s images together, move through the queue, and record a decision. The decision is written to an activity log that does not get overwritten, so the record of what happened stays intact.
Two things follow from that:
- Deciding is not the same as notifying. Marking a decision does not send anything. You choose when the vendor hears from you, and you can jury the whole field first.
- Approval starts the next step. Once you do notify, the vendor moves straight into onboarding: documents, waivers, and the booth fee, with reminders handled for you.
Keep the sheet for one more season
We are not going to pretend a migration is free. Run Trestle beside your spreadsheet for a season if it helps. The point at which most organizers stop opening the sheet is usually the week the booth fee reminders start going out on their own.