Can an Excel Consultant Help With Business Problems?

What follows is a list of functions where we can play the role of advisors whilst building practical solutions to clients, as well as our limitations. A summary of those areas is listed in the table below:

Can an Excel expert minimise my accounting bills?

An accountant can be your business’ bookkeeper, financial analyst, and tax specialist. Excel is the natural home for bespoke financial analysis, so an Excel expert should be able to develop spreadsheets much faster than the average accountant. As accountants have comparable billing rates, an Excel expert makes for a cost-effective replacement. Accountants will still be required for anything tax related as that requires considerable training and professional qualifications.

The general desire to save on professional fees has reduced the amount of bookkeeping conducted by accountants. Nearly all businesses use online software like Quickbooks, Sage and Xero so a lot of the checks and balances required in bookkeeping have now been automated. As those packages are not tailored to individual businesses, the number of transformations required to derive key performance indicators from the basic ledger has increased. Put another way, if you download a monthly P&L from Quickbooks, there may be a lot of Excel work required to see how the business is performing.

At Excel4Business, we frequently automate those processes for clients. We can go further because we’re not scared of building more sophisticated models. A retail business with a few outlets may see significantly stronger sales on a Saturday than a Monday. When assessing monthly performance, it would make sense to factor in the number of trading days and the expected strength of sales on those days. Our consultants can advise on sensible KPIs instead of just developing spreadsheets to order.

Can an Excel expert help lower my financing costs and increase my return on investment?

Where there is a decision to make on how and whether to raise capital, we can build models to inform your decision making. A good model should help you avoid raising too much capital. It can also help you avoid raising too little and having to access further funds at a higher cost. By minimising the level of borrowing, whether from investors or creditors, an Excel expert can reduce your company’s medium-term financing costs. As we are not finance providers, we cannot lower the cost of borrowing.

A good financial model lets the user explore different scenarios to project forwards future earnings. This typically includes a sensitivity analysis where you see what happens if things go better or worse than expected. Our consultants would use their mathematical backgrounds to ensure we restricted this analysis to genuinely significant parameters. Exchange rate risk is important when half your sales occur abroad, less so when 99% of your customers are domestic.

Our value is not just as model makers, but also in helping you interpret the model. We can talk through the moving parts and give you an Excel spreadsheet to take away and play with prior to making any decision.

It is tempting to make decisions using an AI chatbot who is also handy with figures. If there is huge uncertainty over your company’s future sales then an AI would make sense. Considering other factors would be a waste of time and the AI may know more about demand for your specific product than an Excel specialist. The danger of using AI for a more complex investment decision is that the interpretation will ultimately be led by the questions you ask.

Can an Excel consultant help me reduce inventory carrying costs and wastage?

Our Excel gurus can analyse data from your ERP system and, even more importantly, automate the analysis to allow for continuous monitoring of stock levels. If it’s quicker to identify when stock levels fall below acceptable minimums, and quicker to re-order from existing suppliers, then you don’t need to carry as much stock. Electronic stock monitoring can never be a full substitute for physical stock checks but figures don’t tend to diverge that quickly.

At Excel4Business, we have also played an advisory role to construction firms looking to minimise the cost of goods. A lot of building materials are bought in lengths that can be cut to size. Offcuts of a usable length are resold; short offcuts are scrapped. We can bring together past sales data to advise on what to stock, and then build Excel tools to help prepare orders efficiently.

In theory such a system can optimise for everything. In practice, there may be other business constraints. To optimise cutting schedules and minimise wastage, it’s often best to buy in longer lengths of raw materials. However, there may be limited suitable racking on which to store them in the warehouse. Or it may not be practical to store 100 different lengths of offcut.

Building an inventory management tool often turns into an iterative process which Excel is well-suited for. If there are too many undisclosed constraints and business-specific rules, there is a danger the tool ends up costing more than it is worth. In that case, the solution may be to rationalise the existing rules by looking at the staff and physical processes involved. At that point a management consultant may be a better bet.

Can an Excel consultant make my HR department more efficient?

A spreadsheet is very good at tracking resources and that includes humans. Excel can be used to track attendance and overtime but the greatest labour savings can often be found in automating employee notifications. There are specialist solutions to the most common problems such as paying salaried employees, but there are fewer options to deal with more unique problems. Note we would not recommend fully automating any process where actions taken could have legal ramifications, such as in employee disciplinary procedures. We would also be unable to advise on potential liabilities.

Excel4Business is often asked to help manage employee training and certifications. The starting point is generally that HR use Excel to track certificate expiry dates and want to integrate that with the process of booking employees onto courses. To run the process manually, an administrator would have to match individual employees to relevant courses. As the number of employees and courses increase, the process slows down exponentially and the chance of error increases.

Another place our consultants have helped is in the allocation of tips between employees working in hospitality. The exact share an employee gets can depend on their role, the exact shift they worked, and the number of colleagues working at the time. An agreement that keeps everyone happy might be an agreement that creates a lot of work. We can advise and develop processes that reduce the time required to honour employee agreements. A spreadsheet also gives employees a paper trail should one be required.

In both example projects, an automated process should bring down the error rate because the manual alternative isn’t likely to be treble checked every time. In more sensitive areas, such as employee disciplinary procedures, efficiency is less important than ensuring everything is done correctly. It would be unwise to automate any processes where the current practices might become outdated and legally unsound.

Can salespeople record their sales in Excel?

If your business already uses CRM software then there is no good case for moving to Excel. However, if your salespeople use Excel and you just want to make the records more accessible to management, an expert in Excel might be able to keep everyone happy by adapting their existing Excel tool. The alternative is to bring in an expert in change management to impose a CRM on them.

Car dealerships are the textbook case for using Excel in sales. A good manager will devise targets and competitions to incentivise sales staff. One month they’ll be pushing gap insurance, the next they’ll be pushing service contracts. The manager records their team’s progress towards the goals in Excel and, as high ticket items, the number of sales has never outgrown the spreadsheets.

The problem is that the spreadsheet must be shared with the workshop, with the finance team, and the directors also want live access to the sales pipeline. As the dealership opens new sites, the problem becomes more acute. At a certain point, the process cannot be all about the sales team but the sales team will baulk at the idea of seeing their admin increased.

An Excel consultant might be able to find a solution where they take ownership of the existing Excel files and improve the access for all. That might require standardisation in the process, some loss of flexibility, but should not create many additional steps. One way to get a sales team on side is to frame the changes as giving them access to live leaderboards and progress against their targets. Those overviews are based on the same data that everyone else needs.

The above is an example of an Excel consultant taking on a greater role as a political player within an organisation where their specialist knowledge can be deployed to keep everyone happy.

Note the use of Excel in sales should generally be considered a political choice where salespeople wield greater power. Those companies tend to sell face-to-face which lowers the benefits of a CRM. An online business should always use a CRM like Salesforce due to the ease of web integration and the fact the customer does a lot of the basic admin when completing an enquiry form.

Can an Excel consultant help me comply with applicable business law and regulations?

Excel is very good for building bespoke checklists whether you want to record the fact you’ve seen an employee’s passport, or whether you want to record a successful permit application. If you tell our developers what you want to track, they can build a tool. They cannot tell you whether that tool is tracking the right thing, or advise on whether the process is legally required.

In most areas, we believe an Excel consultant can provide useful insight that would not be available if you asked an AI to undertake the same task. That’s because we can introduce our own professional judgements based on years of experience. Corporate law is more black and white; if you don’t know it, you shouldn’t pretend to know it.

The cost of health and safety, data protection, and HR legal consultants can seem high, especially as they tend to recommend following standard processes. If, as a business owner, you are happy keeping abreast of the law yourself, then our Excel experts can incorporate the required checks into any spreadsheets you have. That may be manageable for things like pre-employment checks where the government actively tries to make employers aware of changes in their responsibilities. It may not be feasible in less well publicised parts of corporate law.

Excel4Business can build bespoke sheets to help your business comply with legal advice. With AI, it is hard to see that we would add sufficient value to a solution unless the advice impacts existing Excel processes.