What is an Excel Dashboard?
A dashboard is usually a single pageview of reports comprising of charts, tables and other summaries of data that provide a high-level visual overview of your business.
Job Management
Carpet & Flooring Installation
Challenge
This Carpet & Flooring installation business had searched for years for the right solution to their job management requirements without success.
The reason was because solutions available were based on financial accounting systems with restrictive processes that didn't allow for the way they wanted to conduct their job management.
The key challenge for this client was finding the balance of simplicity and a focus on the job management components of their process without any restrictions that a financial accounting system requires to ensure the "ledger" balances.
Another key challenge in this project was the clients request to have the "Look & Feel" of Excel with the ability to share data with multiple users within the business, possibly at the same time.
How we help with Dashboards?
Solution
This project started as a stand-alone Excel Spreadsheet delivering job management and became a multi-user system with an Excel front-end backed by a SQL Database.
XLAutomation designed a solution that presents data in an Excel friendly format while using SQL Database to store the data. This allows multiple users to access the same data at the same time and SQL transactions ensure that data integrity is maintained.
The key functions delivered in this job management solution were:
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Quoting
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Estimate & Costing Sheets
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Materials & Labour lists
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Purchase orders
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Work orders
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Deliveries
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Variations
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Invoicing
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Warehouse
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Files & Correspondence.
Outcome & Benefits
Once implemented the solution started to deliver real benefits for this business.
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Time saving as all quote details in a single place available to all
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A consistent and accurate job costing process that made sense
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Quoting was simplified and integrated to the process with status
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Once approved Quotes were converted to Projects and automatically notified to the Accounting team to ensure tracking of payments and expenses could begin
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Transparency across the business for the status and expected income
The implementation for this project is still underway and it can be expected that further benefits will be delivered as the functionality is expanded to include the Warehouse & Invoicing.
