Thursday, October 18, 2007

The pains in budgeting

One of the pains in budgeting is in the consolidation of data, from departments to company level or from country level to regional level. It is a pain because people usually have to link the numbers to the consolidated worksheet. If there are only 3 to 4 files to link, it may not be so bad. Each cell would have only 4 cell references.

But imagine if you need to link 5 or more files together. You could take a lot of time, not to mentioned that there are a high chance that you might link the wrong cells together. And your user in one department may decide that the expenses should be in another row and amend the file to suit their needs and not yours. If this happens, you would start to do more checks on the file for fear that they have also done that to other rows. Or they decide to change the layout in between versions.

Some companies that sell budgeting solutions would therefore recommend that you use their solutions which will solve your problem but will set you back by hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you are in this situation, I have good news for you. By just using formulas and MSQuery (a tool given in MSOffice), you can easily consolidated the information you have into the main file even when they changes the rows in the template. There is no more fear about users changing the row layout, you need not waste any more time checking the layout and the formulas. With our proposed solution, you will be able to save time consolidating the details. What if I told you that you could even provide analysis that satisfy all your users without you have to spend hours or even days trying to prepare the report for them? If you are interested to find out how, drop us an email to keep you updated when our course is ready.

Recruitment

I met up with a potential client today and we spoke a little on recruitment. She told me, based on her past experience, it is important to respond to job applicant fast. If not, you will end up having to call identied/potential candidates only to find out that they have already find a job.

I shared with her the need to save cost in recruitment using data that exist from the previous recruitment (for the same position). I also shared with her how Excel could be used to create a form that can be used to captured data filled in by the job applicants. This will help her save the need to sieve thru the resumes and immediately go on to the selection process. Because sieving thru the resume takes time and if there are more than one position to recruit, there will not have enough time to sieve the resume for different position. And doing so means you can get your choice candidate before someone else.

And also save on advertising cost. Because if you advertise for a position and you are not able to fill it with the choice candidate, you will end up wasting advertising cost.