Smart Stuff: Solutions

You may use Excel in a number of ways: to collect data or to analyse cashflow, work or sales. Once you have the raw data, you need to carry out certain tasks periodically, such as producing reports, invoicing, or preparing figures for VAT and tax returns. You may have to copy data from one month to a summary sheet, or to a different workbook. These tasks can be time-consuming and an opportunity for errors to creep in. I can optimise your existing worksheets to make it easy for you to enter your records accurately, and create custom-built business solutions using macros and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to automate tasks so that you can get the job done with just a click of your mouse.

Or perhaps a key staff member has left: the one who really knew how the spreadsheets operated, who designed all the complex formulae, laid out all the reports, set the data validation and conditional formatting ... and now you have nobody around who can fill the gap. I can help you by getting to grips with your workbooks and working with you to find the best solution for the future.

Maybe you don't even use Excel: you have specialised programs to operate your business. But what if these need to talk to each other and share data? They may not have import and export options in common - but pretty much everything knows about Excel, so this can be used as the missing link, rather than risking errors by transfering data manually from one program into the other.

Here are some of the many solutions I have created for my clients:

• Claims Tracker with management of client data and deadlines
• Connecting job management software to Sage, "translating" the data with Excel's Power Query
• Using Excel's Data Model to produce Pivot Table reports based on data taken from multiple worksheets
• Automated expense claims processing for a multinational publishing company
  
• Cash-flow forecasting with automated adding of regular payments
• Lists of work or sales with automated invoice creation
• Analysis of case work for a legal firm, using a combination of Excel and Word
• Bank reconciliation sheets
• Business expenses analysis sheets
• Lists of work carried out by multiple staff members, analysed as a whole
• Optimising spreadsheets for easier data entry
• Creation of charts and pivot tables to analyse spreadsheet data

This is just a selection of the work I have carried out to date, so if any of these ideas would suit you, or if you have different problems needing solutions, Contact me and I'll see if I can help you.