One of my regular clients is expanding his business into a slightly different area of interest. Rather than using his existing spreadsheet to account for the new side of things, he called me in today to help him set up a new spreadsheet to handle this aspect of his business separately. I was happy to do so, and introduced him to some of the newer features of Excel that will make his work easier. After an hour’s work, he has a cleaner sheet that will let him enter the data efficiently and quickly. I showed him how to hide certain columns for printout, and I set up the required formulae correctly.
This lead me to consider small business spreadsheets in general. I imagine that most SMEs use spreadsheets in their businesses, for cashflow, profit/loss, income/expenditure, business plans, quotations, invoicing and so on. But most people running small businesses are not experts in using computer software – they have a business to run and their expertise lies in that field.
Several of my clients have come to me with spreadsheets that they think are “just about good enough”. They have designed them like a paper-based system and can, with a couple of hours’ effort, extract the information they need for various situations. An end-of year report may take longer, perhaps a day or two. They ask me if I can help do a “tidy up” and maybe show them a few tricks. Sometimes it is that simple, but on other occasions I do a fairly radical re-design: my aim in either case is to make the spreadsheet fast and easy to use, both when inputting data and when analysing the results. One of my clients has told me that her data entry now takes about a quarter of the time it used to, and her end-of-year reporting has gone down from two days to under two hours!
If you use spreadsheets in your business, ask yourself “Friend or foe?” If data entry is a chore and you have to fight to extract the information you need, then your spreadsheet is not right for you. Contact me, and I bet you’ll be amazed at the difference I can make!
