Snag list templates: Word, Excel, PDF or app?
Choosing a snag list template looks like choosing columns. It is not. The columns are the easy part and they are much the same everywhere — item, location, description, photo, trade, status. What you are really choosing is how the list will be kept alive over the six weeks between the first inspection and the last item being signed off.
That is where formats separate. Below is what each one is genuinely good at, and the point at which it starts costing you time. If you only want the field list, that is in the companion piece on what a snag list template should include.
1. A printed or PDF form
A paper pad, or a PDF you fill in on a tablet. Still the most common thing on a small job, and there is no shame in it: it needs no signal, no battery and no training, and nothing is faster than a pen when you are up a ladder.
Where it works: a single unit, one inspection, one trade to chase.
Where it stops working: the moment anything changes. A paper list cannot be re-sorted by trade, cannot be filtered to the eleven items still open, and cannot be reissued without being retyped. Photographs live on the phone entirely separately, which is the single biggest source of unusable snagging records.
2. Excel or Google Sheets
The default for most professionals, and for good reason: sorting, filtering, a column per trade, and a summary count at the bottom without any effort. A shared sheet also lets the contractor update status directly, which removes a whole round of emails.
Where it works: anything up to a few hundred items where the photographs are few, or handled separately with real discipline.
Where it stops working: photographs and revisions. Embedded images detach from their rows the first time someone sorts the sheet; hyperlinks to a shared folder break as soon as the folder is reorganised. And a spreadsheet has no concept of an issued version — when the contractor says he was never told about item 42, the sheet has been edited eleven times since and cannot show what it said in week two.
It is still worth setting up properly if it is the tool you have. There is a full walkthrough in snag list format in Excel.
3. A word processor document
A Word file with a table, usually inherited from whoever held the job before you. It produces a respectable-looking document and takes photographs inline, which is more than a spreadsheet manages.
Where it works: short lists written once and issued once — a handover report for a single flat, say, where the document is the deliverable.
Where it stops working: as a live list. You cannot filter a Word table by trade, the numbering renumbers itself the moment a row is deleted, and a document with sixty embedded photographs becomes slow to open and awkward to email.
4. A purpose-built snagging app
A tool that treats the defect as the record, with the photograph, the position and the status as properties of it — rather than a document that happens to mention all four.
Where it works: anything with a floor plan, more than one trade, or more than one visit.
Where it costs you: a short learning curve, and the discipline of recording on site rather than writing notes and typing them up later. Most people find that habit is what saved the time, not the tool.
The three things that decide it
Whichever you pick, these are what break first:
- Photographs. Can the picture be attached to the item at the moment you take it? If not, you will spend an evening matching images to rows, and some will never be matched.
- Location. Written locations are ambiguous — "second bedroom, right hand wall" depends on which way you were facing. A pin on the drawing is not.
- Revisions. Snagging is iterative. If your format cannot produce a frozen R0, R1 and R2 that still say what they said when you issued them, every dispute becomes your word against theirs.
A reasonable rule of thumb
One unit, one visit, few photographs: use whatever is closest to hand, and file the photos the same day. Anything phased, anything with a floor plan, anything you will have to reissue: use something built for it. The cost of the wrong format is not paid on the day of the inspection — it is paid six weeks later, when you have to prove what you found.