Gathering information into a shared Excel spreadsheet from multiple employees without Google Forms?

Question

Spreadsheets

Give a direction: in which direction to look or which finished software product to focus on. At the end of the day, you need to collect information from 15-20 employees about their daily output (a simple report, for example: "Jeans for 500 - 3 pieces, Jeans for 100 - 5 pieces, jacket for 5000 - 1 piece"). Accordingly, this is all reduced to one daily table, and daily to a monthly report.
Probably the functionality of Google Forms is enough, but in recent days, the prospect of Google in the Russian Federation, plus third-party access to forms, is not obvious to me personally.
Employees are all different, often changing, phones are not all normal with the Internet. Therefore, I want to install an old computer permanently, which will perform the function of a data entry terminal with sending to the server (you can raise your own).
The task is typical, but I don’t want to deploy CRM for this department now. It is advisable to check the approach in test mode for the time being. Has anyone had a similar experience?

Answer 1

Start with data formalization. At least introduce uniformity of names (the name should be selected from the list, and not entered in free form, or a form with all possible names should be filled in) and data presentation format. This is task 1.
Task 2 is to decide how the daily form will be filled out. The web form is generally quite suitable here. On Google, the world did not converge like a wedge - there are the same Yandex documents, for example ...
Task 3 - transfer of the finished form. Here I would recommend uploading to a local CSV and sending by email. This is a controlled and logged channel, it is useless to say that the letter was sent on time if it is not in the sent ones or if the date of sending is hopelessly overdue.
Task 4 - loading the received data into a single storage. Here it is already possible to think of a decent DBMS. Well, its regular client means for downloading - behind the eyes.
Task 5 - analytics. Having data in the database, getting analytics in any form and section is not a problem.
Well, task 6 is the formation of beautiful output documents with the results of the analysis. Not to say it's a problem either.

Answer 2

mobile client + server with SQL
on a mobile client - formalized input from the list by selecting the quantity and authorized sending
on the SQL server - receiving and checking data, collating it into a single database and generating a report
if you don’t want to bother with mobile clients - there is always sending data by mail from forms, RDP login to the server for input, etc.