Start here
What LumoSheet does
The problem it replaces, the three people who use it, and the shape of a campaign from invitation to decision.
5 min read
LumoSheet replaces the email-and-spreadsheet round trip that buyers and suppliers use to agree a list of line items. You publish a form and a deadline, suppliers fill it in online or in a workbook, the campaign closes itself, and you accept or reject each line in one table.
The problem
A promotions buyer asks forty suppliers for their next-quarter offers. Each supplier sends a spreadsheet. The spreadsheets have different columns. Three arrive late, two arrive twice, one is a photo of a printed page. The buyer merges them by hand, spots that half the prices are missing, and starts a second round of email. Nobody can say which version is current, and the answer to "did we approve that?" lives in somebody's sent folder.
Every part of the product exists to remove one step of that:
| Instead of | You get |
|---|---|
| Different columns per supplier | One intake form you define once. Both the online grid and the Excel template are generated from it, so every submission arrives with the same columns and the same validation. See Intake forms and field types. |
| Chasing people by email | Milestones with reminders that send themselves, before a date and after it. See Milestones and reminders. |
| A deadline nobody honours | The campaign closes itself at the deadline. Supplier editing locks at the same moment, so the list you review is the list that existed at the deadline. |
| Merging spreadsheets | One Received table across every supplier, filterable and sortable on any field, with a shareable URL. See Received. |
| Approval buried in email | A decision per line item, a full revision history, and an audit trail of who did what. |
| "Which version is this?" | One record per line item with a human-readable reference ID, editable by its supplier until the deadline and never after. |
Who uses it
| Role | What they do |
|---|---|
| Campaign Manager | The buyer. Configures campaigns, invites suppliers, and decisions the submissions. Sees only the campaigns they own or co-manage. |
| Admin | A Campaign Manager plus the administration modules: user accounts, the supplier directory, email templates, the email log, the audit trail, billing, SSO and data export. An admin also manages every campaign in their own organization. |
| Supplier Contact | The supplier. Sees only the campaigns they were invited to, and inside those, only the items belonging to the supplier tags they hold. A broker holds several tags and can act for each brand separately. |
The shape of a campaign
Every campaign, whatever kind, moves through the same stages. The rail across the top of the campaign page shows which one it is in.
Campaign lifecycle
- Set up
- Collecting
- In review
- Complete
Set up (status DRAFT)
You name the campaign, define the intake form, set the deadline and any other milestones, and list the suppliers. Nothing has left the building: no supplier can see the campaign and no invitation has been sent.
Collecting (status OPEN)
Pressing Open campaign sends every invitation and makes the campaign visible to its suppliers. This is the one irreversible-feeling step in setup, which is why it is a separate button rather than a side effect of saving.
The campaign stays here while suppliers submit. They can edit their own items freely, and reminders send on the schedule you configured.
In review (status CLOSED)
At the end of the deadline day the campaign closes itself: supplier editing locks and every submitted line moves to Pending, with you. You work the Received table and accept or reject each line.
Complete
You send the decision notifications. Each supplier gets one email listing their own outcomes, not one email per line.
Complete is worked out rather than set: it means the campaign is closed and neither side owes the other anything. A line still in review, out for revision or owing a detail form holds the campaign in the stage before it. Once it lands, Start next campaign in the Lifecycle card copies this campaign's form, timeline and suppliers into a new draft and opens the guide on it.
The words
Five terms carry most of the product. Everything else is built from them.
| Name | What it does |
|---|---|
| Campaign | One collection exercise with one deadline. A campaign collects one kind of thing: promotions, or displays, or marketing support, not a mixture. |
| Supplier tag | The supplier a line item belongs to. Tags are the unit of access: a contact holds one or more tags in a campaign, and can see exactly the items under those tags. |
| Submission | One supplier's container of items in one campaign. It is created the first time they submit and it is what a submission-scoped edit grant unlocks. |
| Item | One line: one promotion, one display, one offer. It carries a reference ID like Q4PROMO-ACME-003, a status, and its values under the campaign's intake form. |
| Milestone | A dated point in the campaign. The deadline is one; the rest hang off it, and each can send reminder emails before or after itself. |
Reference IDs are built from the campaign code, the vendor code and a per-supplier counter, so Q4PROMO-ACME-003 is ACME's third item in the Q4 Promotions campaign. They are stable, quotable on the phone, and they appear in the exports and the emails.
What the product guarantees
These are enforced, not conventions. You cannot configure your way past them.
| Guarantee | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Tag isolation | A contact sees an item only if they hold that item's supplier tag in that campaign. Two brokers with adjacent brands can work the same campaign and never see each other's lines. |
| The deadline is real | Supplier writes are checked against the deadline at the moment of the write, not at page load. A form left open past the deadline closes the campaign and refuses the submission rather than slipping through. |
| One form, two paths | The online grid and the Excel workbook validate against the same field definitions, so a workbook cannot smuggle in a value the online form would reject. |
| Attachments are always optional | A workbook cannot carry a file, so a required attachment would lock out every Excel submitter. The builder will not let you require one. |
| Everything is attributed | Mutations record who did them. A co-manager's decisions show as theirs, not as the owner's. |
Where to go next depends on what you are here for. To learn the screens, read The interface in detail. To run something today, go to Create a standard campaign. If you are a supplier, the whole of your side is in The supplier's walkthrough, and you can reach your work from RailCampaigns.