As a business owner you have a lot on your plate. You have a vision for your company and steer it towards that goal by keeping one eye on the road ahead and one eye on operations and finance. You don’t have time to sort out technical problems with spreadsheets and data, and having somebody on the permanent payroll for that purpose just doesn’t make financial sense.
But you do need information, you do need to keep track of certain processes in your business, and you do need to plan and analyze. That is where Excel comes into its own – when used properly. Excel, and in fact the entire Microsoft Office suite, is the number one productivity tool for any business. It is cost effective, easy to deploy and it is used everywhere, which means there are no compatibility issues.
Most users only reach the beginner to intermediate level of skill in using the Office applications however, because it is not their job to be experts. As a result they can either not perform all the functions required, or can perform them but take too long, or are simply unaware of what is possible. Excel Developers are here to bridge that skills gap and offer you cost effective solutions that will free up your time and allow you to focus on what’s important: steering your business into the future for the benefit of you and your employees.
Case study – Process automation
Every second week our client was performing a manual process to complete their payroll. Their payroll system produced a csv file with a sheet for each worker, but it contained some superfluous columns and it didn’t distinguish between the first week and second week of the pay period. The client had to manually copy and paste certain columns, from over 40 sheets, into a new workbook, and then manually split the shifts for each worker between week 1 and week 2 of the pay period.
After consulting with the client we also suggested that it would be useful to have a summary report in a single sheet that showed the average hourly rates for each week, and also the pay due to each employee split by regular hours, overtime, holiday and travel allowances.
Their existing process needed four hours of work, every second week. When we presented our solution they were amazed to discover that it took less than a minute to produce everything they needed, including a report that provided a summary they had never been able to see before. And it only required three clicks to produce: clicking a button to start the process, selecting the raw data file produced by the payroll system, and clicking OK to continue.
Our total charge to the client, including consultation time, was four hours. And it has saved them over 100 hours of work every year since.
