Our ultimate goal is always to improve your productivity. Whether this is done through increased automation, process improvement or better quality management information, our expert Excel consultants will work with you to find solutions that fit your needs.
Our customers are typically Finance, HR or Engineering departments or any other business function in medium sized corporations, or business owners and entrepreneurs heading up smaller companies.
Here are some of the tasks we can help you with:
Purpose specific workbooks
Sometimes you need a workbook to perform a very specific task, such as producing a quote for a customer, or calculating the amount of labour hours required to produce specific components. We can design a workbook to your specifications using best practice principles such as cohesion, modularity, segregating inputs from outputs, extensibility and maintainability. Or if you already have such a workbook we can help you to optimise it and reduce recalculation time, add functionality, fix errors, improve visual presentation or automate parts of it.
Data import, transformation and analysis
A typical task performed by Finance or other departments involve copying data produced by accounting software or other systems into Excel, manipulating the data into a suitable format, performing further analysis and then producing a final report. This type of process can be fully automated in Excel so that the user only needs to click a button to start the process. Often there is even no need to produce the systems data first, because Excel can connect directly to many different types of data sources.
Repetitive task automation
Some of the biggest productivity gains can be achieved by automating repetitive tasks. For example you may have a spreadsheet that calculates the profit share of a director. The user enters the director’s name and then saves the result in a PDF document, attaches it to an email and sends it to the relevant director. It may be that the user needs to repeat this process for say 50 directors. Using VBA (the computer programming language that ships with Microsoft Office) we can fully automate that process so that it only requires the click of a button. This can reduce the time required from hours to minutes, even seconds.
General purpose add-ins
Excel possesses an amazing range of functions and formulas capable of performing powerful analysis. But sometimes you may find yourself wishing that it could do something specific to your needs, but it can’t. For example, what if you receive a report displaying numbers in thousands, but you need to see the numbers in millions? Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a button you could click to convert all the numbers to millions? Excel provides no functionality to do this, but Excel can be extended to perform such non-standard operations. The way to extend Excel is by creating “add-ins”. We can create add-ins tailored to your specific needs.
It is impossible to list all the things that can be done using Excel and the above is just a small selection of the services we provide. If you need any of these services or just have a vague feeling that your information processing can be done in a better way, please contact us for a free quote.
Beyond Excel
Sometimes, even with the above enhancements, Excel may not be the optimal solution to your longer term needs. We are also able to advise on and offer database alternatives with easier access to large amounts of data by multiple users and configurable reports. Such applications may be integrated with Excel or Word to provide specific output documentation and / or analysis.
