Google Sheets is a cloud-based spreadsheet tool by Google, widely used for data tracking, reporting, and collaboration. BeLazy offers built-in support for Google Sheets: 

  • if you are using a commercial business management system or connected your own, it enables outcome-based reporting, vendor assignment and other automation, and support for simplifying the project management of continuous localization projects,
  • if you are not using a commercial business management system, Google Sheets offers a ready-to-use project management system that requires no custom development and is configured entirely through the BeLazy interface.


BeLazy's Google Sheets integration is a layer on top of BeLazy's BMS integrations, and can be used:

  • if you are using a commercial BMS, such as Plunet, XTRF or Protemos, to track every project that goes through BeLazy, and update vendors, deadlines in the BMS and the TMS, either manually or through automations,
  • if you are using your own BMS and are interested in integrating BeLazy, to check what information goes through BeLazy, and how to best design your integration,
  • if you are not using a BMS, use the Google Sheet project management application to monitor projects, assign vendors and share this information with your vendors and/or clients.

All projects and jobs received from connected source systems are automatically synchronized into a structured spreadsheet, including financial data, analysis, vendor information, and connector-specific metadata.


Use cases:

The Google Sheets BMS is a good fit if one or more of the following apply to your situation:

  • You are a translation company or language department that does not see the need for a commercial BMS, or is looking for a lightweight alternative for simpler workflows.
  • You want to track projects and jobs from multiple source systems in a single view without building a custom integration.
  • You want business intelligence reporting such as charts, pivot tables, filtering, and custom views using Google Sheets' built-in tools, applied to your live translation project data.
  • You want to implement outcome-based reporting for your own use or your customer's use using external tools such as PowerBI, Looker Studio, Tableau, Domo, etc., and therefore you want connector- and customer-specific metadata from your source systems to be captured automatically as extra columns in the spreadsheet, without manual configuration.
  • You want to use BeLazy's built-in vendor selection and cost calculation capabilities, powered by the price lists and fuzzy schemes you maintain in the spreadsheet.
  • You want script-based automation for vendor assignment, job tracking in other systems or other reasons. Google Apps Scripts allow easy extensibility.
  • You want to share real-time information on project progress with your vendors, coworkers and/or your customers.


The Google Sheet BMS capabilities boost your reporting capabilities, and enable very simple and efficient project management for small projects, synchronizing vendor assignments and job status changes with both your translation management system and with your business management system (if there is one).


Google Sheet is also very extensible: it opens up a new chapter in efficiency optimizations through the use Google Apps Scripts. Due to the data view simplification and data normalization performed by BeLazy, LLMs like Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT can create working scripts within minutes to connect the sheet to the various tools you use, or help you implement advanced vendor assignment strategies (for example, automated internal or regular translator assignment).


Design principles:

BeLazy maintains one comprehensive Google Sheet structure rather than making it configurable. Different roles in the organization need different information, and a filtered view of projects and jobs. You can use the IMPORTRANGE and QUERY (or FILTER) commands to build tailor-made sheets for every project manager. You can also offer certain projects for self-claiming to linguists, saving the work of vendor assignment for the project managers.


BeLazy offers fully customizable extraData handling, which means that client- or job-specific metadata can be included in any BeLazy project, and it travels through the entire lifecycle of the project, up to reporting. For example, if your client wants a breakdown of all the work by their product lines, cost centers or requesters, all the data you will need is available in the Google Sheet, and can be included even in real-time reports.


Requirements:

  • A Google account with access to Google Drive and Google Sheets.
  • Authorization of BeLazy to access Google Sheets and Google Apps Scripts via OAuth. This is done through the BeLazy interface during setup.
  • One important caveat is to only be logged in with a single Google account at a time. Certain Google shortcomings require this. If you are logged in with multiple accounts, open a new incognito tab or log off from all accounts but the one used to manage the system.

How to use: