APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

Developing Excel into Custom Insurance CRM

150 Hour Project

An entrepreneur in Ohio came to us to develop a proof of concept prototype for his custom insurance sales CRM that he had developed in his mind after a career of management in insurance sales. After seeing the capabilities of Excel and the cost effectiveness of our rapid application development, he decided to go for a full scale commercial version in Excel to kick off his business. We can hide sheets and rows and columns, provide navigation buttons, and data entry forms to provide a customized user experience as you would expect any professional software to behave.

Custom Dashboard Project for Verizon

12 Hour Project

This project was for Verizon. They wanted to put up a dashboard on a large monitor in a break room that shows progress towards sales targets. They already had a custom graphic created by a designer, but wanted to integrate a. It looks like a set of charts, but it’s really just four different red colored objects that are moved back and forth through VBA, overlaid onto the graphic Verizon provided. We linked this through ODBC to a SQL Server back end to pull the correct data into the Excel file, which then is converted into coordinates on the screen for the red dial.

Landscaping Company — Using Excel as Custom CRM and Scheduling Program

40 Hour Project

Our client managing a landscaping business was using Excel to manage his business but wanting functionality and automation to make the system more effective. He was considering a move to CRM software but facing a $20,000 implementation cost quoted by the CRM software company consultants to do what he felt like it should already be able to do. He contacted us to see if he could build in this customization into his Excel program. We were able to do satisfy his initial requirement with a quote of just six hours, and have helped him add additional functionality over time to give him exactly what he needed from the custom CRM solution for a fraction of the cost.

Patient visit reporting for Physician

12 Hour Project

The owner of a cardiology group that is an Excel enthusiast and practicing physician contacted us to tidy up an Excel file he had created and add functionality. We created a user form that gives a custom menu with different options to automate manual tasks: creating follow up visit files, importing patient information from other files, printing, emailing, etc.

One Hour Formula Help

One Hour Project

We got a call from a small business owner in Calgary, Canada that was stuck on a formula and had already wasted three hours and a few days posting on forums and trying different solutions. He called us, and we were able to help him over the phone in less than 10 minutes. The trick here was to vary the range in a countifs clause. Not that complex for us, but something that’s easy to waste too much time on trying to hunt down the exact solution. Our minimum charge is one hour and that may seem too steep for some folks to pay $90 for a quick formula fix. But for this small business owner and many of our clients, our hourly rate is a small price to pay for the dependability and quality we offer.

Small project to automate a report

Four Hour Project

This is probably the most common request we get. A company calls us with the request to automate a manual task. In this case, the auditing department of a Texas company would pull up an invoice report. Then go through row by row, looking for patterns that would tip them off that this could be a potential duplicate invoice. They gave us three pieces of complex logic which they used in this auditing process. We quoted just four hours and delivered an automated solution. They browse to select the input file, then click Process, and the result file is created. Our macro added the last three columns on the file on the right. This saved the client hours and hours of work, and they have become a long time client, coming back to us for additional projects.

Excel to Powerpoint Project for a Financial Services Company

18 hour Project

We do a lot of Office integration. Excel to Word. Access to Word. Excel to Powerpoint. In this project, a small company in the financial services industry asked us to help automate a Powerpoint presentation they give to their clients. They utilize a series of complex Excel files to display tables and charts of their clients’ data. They want to move this to Powerpoint, but the charts are created dynamically through Excel macro’s. We delivered a tool to allow them extreme amount of flexibility and control to move charts that met selected criteria to Powerpoint, with the appropriate header and footer text.

Excel to Quickbooks Integration Project

16 Hour Project

As small company experts, of course we are very familiar with Quickbooks. We automate Excel with Quickbooks in a few different ways. We take Quickbooks export reports and develop simple macro’s that combine multiple reports into one, or automates the formatting into the required specification. This is the cheapest/fastest way. We also use do custom development to either pull Quickbooks data for reporting in Excel or to sync application data. We developed our own bidirectional custom Quickbooks syncing program that we can insert into your Excel or Access system. We also have experience with various different API’s and with integrating Excel into different systems: Salesforce, Netsuite, SQL Server, Oracle, SAP, Filemaker.

Project to produce “Magazine Quality” Polished Dashboard

20 Hour Project

Our client is a New York City based marketing company. They came to us in a jam to deliver a proof of concept to a high profile of theirs. The requirement was to deliver an automated refreshable, magazine quality highly polished Excel dashboard per a template their client provided. We set up charts on different tabs, and then brought them together using the camera tool for a powerful visual display. The extraordinary aspect of this job was not just to deliver the project, but also that they came to us on a Friday and were hoping for a Monday delivery. We worked over the weekend and delivered the successful project on time.

Engineering Company — Custom VBA Macro’s

10 Hour Project

We partner with a small engineering company to manage the Excel file they package with their electronic metering device. The Excel file imports a text file created by their device and creates a number charts, tables, and information used to manage their end users data. A recent update on this file consisted of making it “multi-lingual”. The requirement was to make the file multi-lingual to cover English, Spanish, French, and Chinese. We set up a table for them for all the English text elements in the file, including cell text, macro popup text, instructions in text boxes, chart labels, etc. They added columns for each language. Then we set up a way for the user to check which language they preferred, and a macro runs on that selection, which swaps out all the English text objects for the text in the corresponding column.

Project to pull data from multiple files and collate in one master file

14 Hour Project

A Canadian property management company contacted us to help them automate a painful report required for their accounting process. They need to produce a report showing total rental income received compared to total rental income possible. In order to do this, they needed to open 120 Excel files showing detail rental information for each of their properties. For each property, they needed to identify the vacancy months and apply the appropriate “comparison” income amount. We built a macro to loop through all 120 files, pull data from each row in the file reflecting the rental history for each unit in the property, then perform complex logic to give the “comparison” income amount for vacant months. We moved this data into a master table with the required report, and also provided an hour’s worth of pivot table training to allow the client to do “ad hoc” analysis as they desired.

Developing a Custom Reporting Tool for Microsoft

80 Hour Project

Most people have heard of Microsoft and might think it’s odd the owners of Excel would reach out to a small consulting firm like us for Excel help. Most of our clients are small to medium sized companies that are using Excel to manage important business processes, but occasionally we work with large companies also. Microsoft reached out to us initially because they needed quick response to help on a complex pivot table bug they were getting in an important dashboard file they offer to their largest clients of one of their software products. They loved our service and then came back for a complete rebuild of the file to become a dynamic, customized report linked to a SQL back end. They then packaged this as a commercial product for this software.

Project to automate small company Invoicing process

6 Hour Project

Small companies usually start out with very simple, manual processes, and then automate and improve systems as they grow. A company based in Iowa found us in a google search, and inquired about automating their invoice system, that had become unwieldy. They would print an invoice and then save it to a folder, but then they had no ability to easily view summary information such as number of invoices and total invoiced amount. We listened to their requirements, and then quoted a six hour project to automate the invoicing process and expand the functionality. They now have the ability to with a click of the button, save an invoice to pdf, and store the invoice data in a master Excel list file. They also have the ability to pull up old existing customer, view invoice history, and create a new invoice with fields automatically populating in the invoice template.

Excel Modeling with Assumptions and Variables for “What If Scenarios”