Spreadsheet Consolidation

OVERVIEW

WJWatts Consulting created a custom software solution to consolidate spreadsheets. This new process saves a huge amount of time, ensures data integrity and proper financial documentation, and provides vital information for business review and growth.

BACKGROUND

A group purchasing organization needed a better way to consolidate and streamline its data collection process.
Each month, vendors would send large spreadsheets to the organization. These spreadsheets contained information about purchases made by members during the previous period. This information was important for several reasons, including:

1. Accounting Processes - capturing information for tax and reporting purposes.
2. Operations Management - ensuring that members were being serviced and billed correctly by vendors.
3. Business Development - detecting opportunities for connections between existing vendors and members, as well as acquiring new members.
4. Business Review - presenting purchasing information to members for their internal review.

PREVIOUSLY

Previously, the group purchasing organization would manually combine and review these spreadsheets, a process which had several problems:

1. Data consolidation was a labor-intensive and time-consuming process.
2. Each spreadsheet had its own data format, with different types of information.
3. Reviewing the data and ensuring accurate results was extremely difficult.
4. Generating reports for marketing staff and executives was tedious and cumbersome.

SOLUTION

WJWatts Consulting created a custom software solution to solve this problem. Now:

1. Employees can quickly upload each spreadsheet and review the data.
2. The software is web-based, accessible from any device and location.
3. The software is integrated with Salesforce, which the organization uses as a CRM.
4. Salespeople and executives can view real-time dashboards and reports in Microsoft Power BI.