Forty open browser tabs and a folder of screenshots is not a workflow. You know this. You knew it the last time your laptop restarted overnight and took a week of sourcing with it, and you felt that specific, hollow drop in your stomach — not because you can't find the pieces again, but because you're not sure you'll remember which ones you'd already ruled out, and why.
That feeling is worth taking seriously, because sourcing isn't a side task you're doing badly. It's most of the job. Purchasing consumes up to 75% of a designer's workday, according to Fuigo data reported by Business of Home — and in the same reporting, design executives named "entering items and tracking orders" as the two biggest software pain points in the industry. If the way you capture, compare, and track products is improvised, the majority of your working hours are improvised.
Here's the thing though: a real sourcing workflow isn't a tool. It's three habits. You can start all three tomorrow, in whatever you're using now.
Capture once, at the moment of discovery
The tab graveyard exists because capturing feels like it interrupts the fun part. You're in flow, pulling options for the primary bedroom, and stopping to log a side table feels like admin. So you leave the tab open, promising yourself you'll deal with it later. Later, you have forty promises.
The fix is to make capture so small it doesn't break flow — but complete enough that you never have to go back. Every product you're seriously considering gets logged the moment you find it, with six things:
- The source URL (not a screenshot of the product — the actual link)
- The price, and the date you saw it (prices move; a price without a date is a rumor)
- Lead time as quoted, and where the quote came from
- Dimensions
- The room and project it's for
- Supplier contact, if it's trade
That's it. Thirty seconds per item. The discipline isn't in capturing a lot — it's in never capturing the same thing twice. If you find yourself re-Googling a console table you know you found last month, your capture step is broken, and everything downstream of it will be too.
One Bay Area designer described what the alternative looks like at volume: "I forgot to order small items, miscounting handles for kitchen cabinets, and losing track of shipment statuses… I had a terrible time finding emails with the requested status updates for each item. It was a mess!" Notice that none of those failures happened during sourcing. They happened months later — but they were all caused during sourcing, by items that were found and never properly caught.
Compare in one place, per room
Options you can't see side by side aren't really options — they're a memory test. When the three contenders for the dining pendants live in a tab, a screenshot, and an email from a rep, you're not comparing fixtures. You're comparing your recollections of fixtures, and your recollection quietly favors whichever one you saw most recently.
So the second habit: everything under consideration for a room sits in one view, with the same six fields visible for each. This is where a spreadsheet, honestly, works fine for a long time — one tab per room, one row per option, and a column that marks each item's status: considering, presented, approved, rejected.
That last state matters more than it looks. Recording why something was rejected — client vetoed brass, lead time blew past install, over budget — is what stops rejected items from re-entering the conversation three weeks later wearing a different product photo. Your spec should be a living document with a memory of its own decisions, so it doesn't have to borrow yours.
Track from "approved" to "in the room"
Approval is the halfway point, not the finish line. After the client says yes, every item begins a second life: quoted, ordered, confirmed, shipped, delayed, received, inspected. This is the stretch where "where's my order?" emails come from — and it's telling that even on modern platforms, reviewers name "the inability to share the purchase status with clients" as a real gap.
The tracking habit is the same as the capture habit, applied downstream: every status change gets recorded the day it happens, against the item, not in an email thread. When the fabric house says eight weeks instead of five, that goes on the item's row — because six months from now, nobody will find that email, but everybody will look at the tracker.
Some of the most organized firms in the industry run exactly this way. "I live and die by detailed spreadsheets! Organized by room and color coded," one designer told Business of Home about managing install day. It works. Right up until it doesn't.
When the spreadsheet breaks
Be honest about where the ceiling is, because it's predictable. A spreadsheet sourcing system fails in one of three ways:
- Concurrency. Two or three projects, fine. Five or six, and the same product data now lives in an FF&E schedule, a cost plan, a procurement tracker, and a client deck — four documents that agree only as long as one person updates all four. One breakdown of the signs a firm has outgrown Excel names exactly this duplicate entry as the failure mode, along with its uglier sibling: lost approval history, where the approval lives in an email and the spec lives in a file and nobody can prove what the client signed off.
- A second person. The spreadsheet was never really the system — your memory was, and the spreadsheet was its export. Hand it to a new hire and the gaps become their daily emergencies.
- The client wants to see. Clients ask where their money and their sofa are. A working spreadsheet is not something you can hand them without a translation layer, and the translation layer is you, at 9pm.
If none of those three have hit yet, keep the spreadsheet. Genuinely. The habits above are the workflow; the container matters less than the discipline.
If they have hit — this is roughly the problem Mortar was built around. You paste a product URL and it captures the details, price, and image into the project; options sit side by side per room; approvals get logged against the item; and every piece moves through an order pipeline the client can see without emailing you. Same three habits, minus the part where you're the sync engine holding four documents together.
Either way, start with the thirty-second capture rule this week. The workflow that scales isn't the one with the best software — it's the one where nothing important lives only in your head, or in tab thirty-seven.
