How to Save Thousands of Dollars a Year with Excel Automation?
We would all agree that Excel is the most widely used spreadsheet program in the world. But do you know that Excel can make your life much easier with Excel automation? Most probably you have none to little idea how to automate your data entry.
Let’s begin from a simple question.
Let’s talk a little bit about each of them.
Time
Time is money in the business, however, many employers lose money by requiring workers to spend time on tedious tasks. Often, these tasks are simple but necessary, like creating and filling reports. You can’t eliminate them from your business, but it seems like a waste to have someone spending their time on it when they could be performing more productive tasks. Luckily, there is a way to solve this.
Microsoft Excel is a useful tool that every business use, but not many employ it to its full potential. Too often, workers spend hours typing in data and running formulas, although this time spent could be reduced to the minimum.
Excel is designed with many features that can automate these tasks and making the necessity of using up your manpower on data entry a thing of the past.
Would you choose 5 hours of work or a simple click of the button?
As an example, I read an interesting article a month ago, in which an employee wrote that while working from home he spent about a month automating his spreadsheet.
Now, he is supposed to be filing reports for about 5 hours every day. In reality, he’s spending 15 minutes running his VBA code and then just spending time with his family. But he still gets paid for the 5 hours of work his code does in 15 minutes.
These situations can be awkward for both employee and employer. You don’t want to pay someone for work they’re not doing, and they don’t want to spend 5 hours doing work a program could do in 15 minutes.
So, what can you do instead? Excel gives you the opportunity to manipulate anything you want.
You can program it using VBA and do literally anything.
Money
Let’s say you have a 20-minute daily task that can be automated. You might think, why bother? It only takes 20 minutes. Here is quick math.
You have a 20-minute daily task that can be automated.
It is around 7 hours per month and approximately 87 hours per year.
With an hourly rate of 25$, it gives us a total amount of 2100$ per year.
This is an amount that you can save per year by just automating a simple 20 minute task.
Human errors
How many tasks are there that takes more than 20 minutes to complete? Yes, I hear you, many. Furthermore, do you know how many times this simple 20-minute task will be mistaken free? The best-case scenario says 7 times out of 10. And that gives us two more issues to deal with.
Saying that we are lucky and those mistakes are discovered, the reports will have to be redone, which is, again, a waste of time. In case the errors have not been brought to light, it can affect countless areas of your business and that, of course, means a loss of money.
And that is why saving time, money and avoiding mistakes is exactly why automating your Excel spreadsheets should be a priority for you and your business.
But really, what is Excel automation?
Excel automation is the creation of processes by which tasks that can be done without human labour are accomplished automatically, freeing up your employees for work that can’t be automated. So to say, automation in Excel helps your business to make your time work for you and not vice versa.
There are several advantages to automating your business tasks. By reducing the amount of time workers spend on tedious tasks, their stress levels go down, and their job satisfaction goes up.
For the employer, it saves time and money and increases productivity since you no longer need to pay people to do tasks that don’t effectively utilize their skills.
Removing the human element also reduces the errors that pop up in reports and spreadsheets. Even with all these advantages, though, the number of companies automating their work is relatively low, but it is growing rapidly.
What is VBA?
Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is a programming language, one that Excel is specifically designed to work with to customize your spreadsheet.
Writing code can help you copy-paste data, enter data from another spreadsheet, fill a report, insert row/column/sheet and calculate anything you can think of. All these can be achieved by just clicking a button. That’s how simple it is.
So why isn’t everyone doing it?
That’s a valid question. Well, most employers have no idea what VBA is or that they have this ability.
That’s where we at AutomatedXS come in. We work with you to determine which tasks can be automated, and we automate your spreadsheets saving you time and, of course, money.
Your employees will have more time, your productivity will increase, and your mistakes on your reports will drop to zero.
Book a free appointment today and let’s discuss the best ways to automate your Excel spreadsheet.
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