How can we help?

We have bank accounts in Canada, the USA, and the UK so prefer to receive payment by electronic funds transfer or BACS. We can also accept card payments though may cap the size of these payments. We generally take card payments through Wise but do have the option of receiving payments through PayPal in the event that your card is American Express and so not permitted by Wise. If you are paying in advance for a project and require PayPal’s buyer protections, we can bill in that manner.

Historically we have taken payments by cheque. As the practice dies out, we are seeing our charges increase to a level where we cannot accept cheque payments for very small projects.

Our standard agreement with clients is that we bill on satisfactory completion. We are confident you will be happy so we won’t invoice until you sign things off. We make an exception for micro-projects of up to 2 hours, as well as requiring payment in advance from companies with fewer than 10 employees or companies based outside Western Europe and North America. We would also tend to send interim invoices at practical milestones for anything exceeding $5,000.

We do expect our invoices to be paid on receipt though appreciate this may not be a standard procedure especially in larger corporations. If payment is likely to be delayed beyond 30 days then we may request invoicing upfront on the basis you will still get your solution before we receive payment.

Excel4Business Ltd is essentially a network of Excel experts who can be deployed to help clients around the world. As an English language company focused on the US, British and Canadian markets, we expect our consultants to have spent their lives in those countries (although team members have subsequently migrated and worked from Spain and Mauritius in the past).

We expect most of our projects to be completed remotely so, by default, you will be put in touch with an appropriate consultant based on skillset, availability and geography in that order. If you require someone to come on-site then that is generally possible but may significantly increase development costs.

Legally and administratively, Excel4Business Ltd is based in Cambridge, United Kingdom.

To a certain extent, there is no typical customer because the whole world runs on Microsoft Excel. However, our preferred clients are those where we can add the most value as consultants. One example would be the owner of an expanding business with 10-50 employees who wants to speed up internal processes so they can continue to grow. Another example would be a manager within a larger business of 1,000 employees who is trusted with a large degree of autonomy within their area, be it operations, logistics or finance. We also work with smaller clients for whom Excel is the nerve centre of their business.

A typical automation project might take us 20-25 hours, a bespoke data analysis process might take 5-10 hours. When we provide a quote, you should be able to see a payback period measured in months not years.

Traditionally we have also provided smaller bits and pieces to clients, some of whom have then returned with larger pieces of work. Although we’ve never seen ourselves as mere programmers, the advent of generative AI means we are focusing more and more on deeper business questions where chatbots don’t always recognise the bigger picture.

By playing the role of a client with an Excel problem and seeing what sort of solution they propose.

The founder, Ed Bolton, started life as an Excel consultant himself and believes understanding customers is critical to successfully delivering projects. He looks for consultants who can see a client’s underlying problem as well as their immediate pain point. As we charge premium rates, consultants must also develop solutions with just the right level of flexibility for a client’s future use. Too much and the solution is overpriced. Too little and the solution will break.

So we look for consultants who ask the right questions and can put across their vision. Timely, hassle-free delivery is important and total Excel expertise is essential.

As Excel4Business is based on understanding customers, we believe you should always be talking to the same consultant. As they help shape your business’ processes, they will learn how you work and what your priorities are. If that needs to be relayed to anyone else, it creates an overhead that costs you time and money.

However, one advantage of Excel4Business over independent Excel specialists is that you won’t be completely reliant on one person. Let’s say your monthly reports rely on an export from some third-party software and the format changes whilst your primary contact is away. In that case, another consultant can step in to provide a fix in their absence.

Having been in business since 2010, we have seen consultants retire or move on. When that occurs, we would continue supporting your existing solutions whilst providing you with a new primary contact for more extended pieces of work.

All prospective clients should expect to send their data to Excel4Business at some point in a project’s life. It may be possible to provide a quote by viewing a file through Teams, or when we’ve only seen a redacted copy of a file, but it does create additional unknowns which makes it harder to deliver your solution in a quick and efficient manner.

After that, the reality of building a spreadsheet to contain sensitive information is that, even if we build you a blank template, you may find the populated file requires some form of support and troubleshooting down the line.

We treat all submissions in the strictest of commercial confidence but understand you may need to mitigate risk. If you require a confidentiality agreement, we sign those centrally. If you cannot provide your own, we are happy to provide our own template.

We run our own dedicated mail servers in a data centre in London but do not operate a general use Sharepoint server, so your files can only be accessed by your primary contact and management.

We are also registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the United Kingdom and comply with applicable law which is important if you need to send across personal data.

The first step is for you to request a quote. We ask for a few basic project details so we can find an appropriate team member. Some of our experts might know more about Sharepoint, others might know more about Google Sheets.

The next step is the scoping call which is a free consultation. It is almost always useful for you to send us some files prior to that call. If you don’t already have a spreadsheet, a photograph of a manual process may suffice. It gives us a good idea where you might need flexibility and ensures we ask the right questions: Do you have international clients? Can you manufacture bespoke products? You once had an order for 36 different items, is 50 a reasonable maximum?

As long as the consultant has had access to the relevant files, they should then be able to provide a quote. We believe in fixed price quotes based on an estimate of the time required. If we can deliver faster than expected, it generally means you were delighted by our first attempt. If it takes longer, we put in the extra hours.

We believe that a good scoping call should keep further correspondence to a minimum so you should not need to hear from us again until we have a draft product for feedback. We would then work through any remaining issues until you’re happy and we’d then send across our invoice. For a 20-hour project, we would expect you to be using your new file within a month and can work to any reasonable deadline.

There are variants on the process. Sometimes a project is too large to complete as a single phase, or the project was discussed at such a high level that it was impossible to put across how the finished product would work. We would then break the work up into milestones. Sometimes we are asked to make changes to a complex pre-existing file where determining the time required to find a solution is the same as providing a solution. We complete those projects on a consultative basis.