Many sales, marketing and finance teams are stuck manually tracking and updating data in Excel spreadsheets when they could instead be spending the same time analyzing the results of automated reports. Manually maintained Excel reports are not scalable and they often consume entire Sunday afternoons to maintain. OpFocus has automated numerous Excel reports, providing best practices and guidance on optimizing the display of information to support analysis and decision making.
Excel provides us with a flexible platform that most executive teams are comfortable manipulating. That flexible platform contains a VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macro editing environment built into it where we can write and store code that automates reports. We can pull data from various databases, such as Salesforce.com, SQL Server, Access, etc. and even combine data from multiple data sources. Let us help you achieve report automation in Excel!
Some examples of Automation in Excel the OpFocus team has created:
- Global Sales Management Reporting Tool
- With the click of a button in Excel, this Excel report would pull raw data from numerous Salesforce.com reports and generate over 200 worksheets providing analysis for global, regional, and district levels. The tool has an easy to use interface and leverages Analytic Snapshots in Salesforce.com to generate accurate trending charts. The tool is even print formatted to be printed out and bound each week for executive management review.
- Automated Flight Sheets for a Luxury Air Charter Service
- Prior to our creating this Excel tool, a staff member had to spend 30 minutes manually cobbling together data each time they wanted to generate flight sheets for all flights on a particular day. By leveraging WSDL and SQL queries, we created a tool that allowed any day’s flights to be displayed in Excel within 30 seconds via the click of a button.
- Professional Services Projects Reporting
- This has been a popular route for a number of our clients. What was maintained manually in Excel by the head of Professional Services could now be updated by rank and file employees from within Salesforce.com. We created a custom Projects object (table) in Salesforce.com, and wrote Excel VBA code to pull data out into Excel and format the active project list.
- Marketing Campaign, Contact and Activity History Report
- This report pulled in the raw data from three separate Salesforce.com reports and displayed the results on a single visible tab.