MyCBA vs Spreadsheets: Why Locals Lose Grievances They Should Win

Most US locals run on a CBA in a binder, a grievance log in Excel, and a thread of emails buried in a Gmail inbox. The cost is real: missed deadlines, lost institutional knowledge, and grievances that should have been won.

Bottom line

Spreadsheets are free. The cases you lose to them are not. MyCBA pays for itself the first time it saves a deadline.

Feature-by-feature

Feature	MyCBA	Spreadsheets
Deadline tracking	Automated with weekend / holiday / business-day rules	Manual, easy to miss
Contract search	AI Q&A returns exact clause in seconds	Ctrl+F across a PDF or binder
When the steward retires	Institutional knowledge stays in the system	Knowledge walks out the door
Audit trail	Every action logged with user, time, and IP	No trail
Member visibility	Member portal with their own grievance + contract	Members in the dark
Multi-user editing	Real-time, role-based	Version conflicts, "who has the latest file?"
Reporting	Built-in dashboards	Pivot tables, if anyone has time
Cost	From $149/mo	“Free” — plus every case you lose

What to know

—A single missed Step 1 deadline can permanently waive a grievance — even a slam-dunk one. One waived termination grievance can cost a local more than a year of MyCBA.
—Excel doesn’t know that Thursday is a holiday or that the contract says "10 business days excluding Saturdays." MyCBA does.
—Every retirement, every steward turnover, every officer election: with spreadsheets, you start over. With MyCBA, the next person picks up exactly where the last one left off.

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