Technical Debt Ledger — Excel & Google Sheets Tracker for Engineering Teams
Quantify your codebase debt, calculate the real dollar cost, plan debt sprints, and generate a stakeholder report — all in one ready-to-use spreadsheet.Does your engineering team know exactly how much technical debt is costing you — in dollars, per month?Most teams don't. They know the codebase is messy, sprints feel slower than they should, and every new feature takes longer than estimated. But when a manager asks "how bad is it?", nobody has a clear answer.The Technical Debt Ledger changes that.WHAT YOU GETA professionally designed Excel spreadsheet (.xlsx) with colour-coded sheets and 884 live formulas — fully compatible with Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice, and Numbers.Also includes a step-by-step User Guide (.docx) written in plain English for new users.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━THE 5 SHEETS📋 Debt Registry — Log every known debt item with auto-generated IDs, dropdown menus for category, severity, status and owner, and automatic age tracking with colour-coded warnings (amber at 90 days, red at 180 days).📊 Impact Calculator — Automatically calculates your velocity tax (% of sprint capacity lost to debt drag), monthly cost of inaction in dollars, annual cost of inaction, break-even point for fixing individual items, and a live debt ratio with traffic-light colouring.🗓️ Sprint Allocation — Plan exactly how many hours to spend on debt each sprint, commit specific debt items (auto-filled from the registry), and track your sprint-over-sprint debt reduction history.📄 Stakeholder Report — A ready-to-share executive summary that writes itself from your live data, a 6-metric debt scorecard with automatic status indicators, your top priority items, and a recommended actions table for quarterly planning.⚙️ Config & Settings — One control panel for your team name, engineer hourly rate, sprint names, team member list, and severity definitions. Change a value once and it updates every formula across the entire workbook.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━KEY FEATURES✅ 884 live formulas — zero hardcoded values, zero formula errors✅ Auto-generates debt IDs (TD-001, TD-002…) the moment you type a title✅ Calculates fix cost in dollars automatically from your hourly rate✅ Velocity tax estimate shows what % of sprint capacity debt is stealing✅ Monthly & annual cost of inaction calculated instantly✅ Break-even calculator: shows how many sprints until a fix pays for itself✅ Debt ratio traffic light turns green, amber or red automatically✅ Executive summary paragraph that auto-writes from your live data✅ VLOOKUP auto-fills sprint commitment details from the debt registry✅ Colour-coded severity: Critical (red), High (amber), Medium (blue), Low (green)✅ Age warnings: amber after 90 days open, red after 180 days✅ 200-row capacity for debt items✅ Dropdown menus throughout — no manual typing of categories or statuses✅ Works in Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice, and Apple Numbers━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━WHO IS THIS FOR?→ Engineering leads and team leads who need to make the case for debt reduction to management→ CTOs and VPs of Engineering who want visibility into technical debt across their teams→ Scrum masters and agile coaches managing sprint capacity and debt allocation→ Senior developers frustrated by debt that never makes it onto the roadmap→ Startups scaling fast and needing to track the shortcuts they're taking━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━THE MATH THAT SELLS IT FOR YOUAt a typical engineer rate of $85/hour, a single Critical debt item slowing your team by just 2 hours per sprint costs over $600 per month — $7,200 per year.Most teams have 5–15 such items.The Ledger identifies and quantifies every single one of them in a format you can put in front of any stakeholder.At $49, it pays for itself the first time it helps you justify a single debt-reduction sprint.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━WHAT'S INCLUDED IN THE DOWNLOADTechnical_Debt_Ledger.xlsx — The full 5-sheet spreadsheet with sample data pre-loaded so you can see it in action immediately.Technical_Debt_Ledger_Help_Guide.docx — A illustrated user guide with step-by-step instructions for every sheet and every column, written for new users with no prior experience.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONSDo I need advanced Excel skills?No. Everything uses standard dropdown menus and simple data entry. The formulas are all pre-built and work automatically.Does it work in Google Sheets?Yes. Upload the .xlsx file to Google Drive and open with Google Sheets. All formulas (COUNTIF, SUMIF, VLOOKUP, IF, TODAY) are fully compatible.Can multiple team members use it at the same time?Yes, if hosted on Google Sheets, OneDrive, or SharePoint. Multiple people can edit simultaneously.Can I customise it for my team?Absolutely. Add your team members, sprint names, and engineer rates in the Config sheet and everything updates across the whole workbook.Developed by Sankar Srinivasan📧 petra.srini@gmail.com🔗 https://beacons.ai/sankarsrinivasantechnical debt tracker, tech debt spreadsheet, engineering productivity template, sprint planning Excel, software debt calculator, velocity tax, stakeholder report template, agile sprint tracker, developer productivity tools, Excel template for developers
Get it → sankarsrinivasan.gumroad.com