The Quick Read
- A Cebu City founder with an enterprise IT background is building affordable, custom business systems for small and growing companies using Excel and Google Sheets, not expensive enterprise software.
- Everyday Productivity Tools (EPT) designs solutions for sales tracking, inventory, payroll, dashboards, and workflow automation, tailored to how each business already operates.
- The company is shaping its offerings through direct conversations with business owners across industries as varied as restaurants, clinics, schools, and pharmacies.
- EPT’s core belief is that small businesses don’t need complicated platforms, they need practical systems that fit tools they already know.
A Founder Bets on Tools Small Businesses Already Know
Small business owners in Cebu City often face the same quiet problem. Sales get tracked on paper, inventory gets counted by hand, and payroll gets recalculated every cutoff in a spreadsheet nobody quite trusts. Enterprise software promises to fix this, but it usually comes with a price tag and a learning curve that a five-person shop cannot justify. Most small businesses do not need a full platform migration. They need something closer to what they already have, just built properly.
Giovanni Ugtong saw that gap and built Everyday Productivity Tools (EPT) around a simpler idea: give businesses custom business systems built in Excel and Google Sheets, the tools they already use every day. Ugtong is not new to building systems. Before starting EPT, he spent years working in enterprise IT and networking, the kind of work built on solving operational problems reliably, where a system either holds up under real use or it does not. That background shapes how he approaches small business clients now. Instead of pushing businesses toward unfamiliar platforms, he keeps the tools familiar and rebuilds what happens around them. The interface stays the same. What changes is whether the file behind it actually works the way the business needs it to.
Custom Business Systems Built Around Real Operations
EPT designs sales and inventory tracking systems, payroll and attendance trackers, dashboards, appointment scheduling, customer databases, and workflow automation, all inside spreadsheet tools business owners already know how to open. “We don’t just build spreadsheets,” is how EPT puts its philosophy. “We design practical business systems that help small businesses save time, reduce errors, and make better decisions.” Each of those solutions counts as one of the custom business systems EPT builds, not a generic download meant to fit every business the same way.
That distinction matters. A spreadsheet is just a file. A system is something built around how a specific business actually operates, so it gets used instead of abandoned after a week. This is where custom business systems earn their name, each one is shaped to match a particular business’s workflow rather than forcing that business to adapt to generic software. A clinic tracking patient appointments has different needs than a repair shop tracking parts inventory, and a lending business reconciling daily collections needs something different again from a school managing enrollment records. Off-the-shelf templates tend to flatten those differences. EPT’s approach is to build around them instead.
The current focus is entirely on business clients, covering sales monitoring, inventory management, payroll and attendance, dashboards and KPI reporting, appointment scheduling, customer and client databases, and custom workflow automation. A second track is on the horizon, a library of ready-made templates built for personal use rather than business operations, but Ugtong is treating that as a future goal rather than something to rush now. The business-systems work is where the demand already is, and where EPT is putting its attention while that demand is still being understood in detail.
Built From Conversations, Not Assumptions
EPT is still early. Founded less than a year ago, the company has not yet completed a long list of finished client projects, and Ugtong is upfront about that. What he does have is a growing set of conversations with real business owners across a wide range of industries, restaurants, schools, clinics, lending businesses, repair shops, and pharmacies among them. Each conversation surfaces a different operational headache. A restaurant owner might be losing track of ingredient costs against menu pricing. A clinic might be juggling appointment slots across multiple providers with no shared view of the day. A lending business might need a daily collections summary that actually reconciles by closing time instead of requiring a manual recount. None of these are exotic problems, but each one requires a system built around how that specific business already runs, not a generic template retrofitted to fit.
Every one of those conversations shapes what EPT builds next. It is a slower way to grow a company than launching with a fixed product line and hoping the market matches it, but it means the systems EPT eventually delivers are built around problems business owners actually described, not assumptions about what small businesses might need. Ugtong has been direct about where the company stands. There are no inflated numbers here, no claims of client rosters that do not exist yet. What is real is the range of industries reaching out, and the pattern that is starting to emerge from those conversations, that small businesses across very different sectors are running into the same basic gap between what they can afford and what they actually need to stay organized.
That approach responds to a real shift happening across the small business sector. More owners are looking for affordable ways to run tighter operations without signing up for costly software platforms that assume a headcount and budget they do not have. Excel and Google Sheets are already familiar, already installed, and already free or near-free to use. The barrier was never really the tools. It was the design work needed to turn a blank spreadsheet into something that functions like an actual system, with the right structure, the right formulas, and the right layout for how a specific team works day to day. That gap between an ordinary spreadsheet and one of EPT’s custom business systems is exactly the design work most small businesses do not have the time or the technical background to do themselves, and it is what EPT is stepping in to provide.
For a small business owner still tracking inventory on paper or reconciling payroll by hand, the offer is straightforward. EPT is not selling a platform migration or a subscription to something unfamiliar. It is offering custom business systems built inside a spreadsheet the business owner already knows how to open, designed around how that specific business runs. What EPT is really selling is not the spreadsheet. It is the design work that turns a blank one into something a business can actually run on, built by someone who spent years making systems work reliably before he ever built one for a small business owner in Cebu.
Readers can find Everyday Productivity Tools (EPT) on Facebook to see current work and inquire about a custom system.
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