Excel automation

March 23, 2017 By Bob Lewis-Basson

Not more spreadsheets to analyse and chart…

Always a regular cry in the office. Reports produced on a regular basis need to be embellished, with charts that involve some fairly complicated calculations – cross-reference look-ups, previous month comparisons, and all that sort of thing.

Probably, now this is done largely by hand. The data sits in several spreadsheets and/or databases, and is extracted, filtered, pivoted and everything else that was necessary to get it ready, before feeding into a chart. When the chart was ready, it is pasted into the report.

Wouldn’t it be great with the data is all in one place, and with a single front-end, the necessary criteria set from drop-downs. Once these selections have been made (locations, benchmarks, which dataset to use, and so on) you click a button and go and make coffee. Actually, you haven’t really got time to make coffee as the process takes just a couple of minutes – if that.

In this instance, any number of queries can be run; sometimes one query, sometimes several to generate the data. Each one automatically loading a into an Excel workbook, in to the right columns, in the right order to aid presentation. Then, your screen explodes into a fresh multi-coloured set of charts based on the information just collated! And is that the pivot table I slave over every month appearing before my very eyes!

In the past that has meant spending anything between a couple of hours to a couple of days for more complex reporting every period. Multiply that by twelve, and it becomes a not insignificant amount of time in a year m to get these twelve reports, graphs and charts prepared.

Say it was half a day of someone’s time, at the average salary of £26,000 – that’s a cost of around £60+ to the business for each report, or chart. Each and every time.

If reporting is weekly, that’s going to be more than £3,000 every year – more likely a lot more than that. If it now takes 30 minutes to do the whole job, that’s a total of just over 4 days for the whole year’s worth (at one report a week). The four days will cost under £500. So you get to keep £2,500 to do something else with.

What would you like to do with it?

Excel automation by Bob Lewis-Basson – 07802 441 728

Data Protection

March 22, 2017 By Bob Lewis-Basson

Under the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) you must:

use personal information fairly and lawfully;
collect only the information necessary for a specific purpose(s);
ensure it is relevant, accurate and up to date;
only hold as much as you need, and only for as long as you need it;
allow the subject of the information to see it on request; and
keep it secure.

Good information handling makes good business sense, and it provides a range of benefits. You’ll enhance your business’ reputation, increase customer and employee confidence, and by ensuring that personal information is accurate, relevant and safe, save both time and money.

Your business has established an appropriate Data Protection Policy?

A policy will help you to address data protection in a consistent manner. This can be a standalone policy statement or part of a general staff policy. The policy should clearly set out your business’s approach to data protection together with responsibilities for implementing the policy and monitoring compliance. The policy should be approved by management, published and communicated to all staff. The policy should also be reviewed and updated at planned intervals or when required to ensure it remains relevant.

Your business has nominated a data protection lead?

It is good practice to identify a person or department in your business with day-to-day responsibility for developing, implementing and monitoring the data protection policy. Allocating these responsibilities to a data protection lead will help you effectively manage and co-ordinate data protection, and make your business more accountable. The lead should be appropriately skilled and have the necessary authority and resources to fulfil their duties.

Your business provides data protection awareness training for all staff?

Any data security breaches are accidental and result from insider actions. You should brief all staff handling personal data on their data protection responsibilities. It is good practice to provide awareness training on or shortly after appointment with updates at regular intervals or when required. Specialist training for staff with specific duties, such as marketing, information security and database management, should also be considered. The regular communication of key messages is equally important to help reinforce training and maintain awareness (for example, intranet articles, circulars, team briefings and posters).

If you are not sure where you stand in respect to DPA (Data Protection Act) or the forthcoming GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) call me now …

Bob Lewis-Basson 07802441728, or email bob.lewis-basson@tvba.co.uk

Power up your business with a Virtual Non-Executive Director

March 6, 2017 By Gordon Carmichael

The benefits of Non-Executive Directors are well understood by many successful business owners. They bring an independent view and additional experience that enable better decisions to be made by the management board. Our Home Counties and London Group Business Advisors have developed a Virtual Non-Executive Director (VNED) service that offers Managing Directors and business owners the same independent view and advice without the complexity of shareholdings, appointing legal directors and director’s service agreements.

Every company is different and yet there are many similar and transferable aspects from other industries and markets. Our experts are able to utilise their broad business experience and extensive network of contacts to support companies to achieve their strategic objectives. An independent view that challenges existing or new strategies can substantially enhance the robustness of a company’s direction. Sometimes difficult decisions are required to deal with business problems and the VNED can act as a sounding board to provide guidance and help the decision making process.

Our approach recognises that established and start up businesses have different needs at different times in their life cycle. New businesses often have a need to demonstrate credibility externally to customers and investors. Appointing a Virtual Non-Executive Director can enhance this.

How does it work?

The optimal Virtual Non-Executive Director approach varies with the needs of a business, the existing in-house skills and the “personality” of its MD and management team. Our experts are adept at engaging with companies to strike a balanced approach between coaching, practical advice, strategic input and holding the management to account where appropriate. Prior to engagement, we offer a confidential, no obligation, no holds barred discussion to establish what is actually needed and to establish priorities. A flexible approach is adopted to accommodate the practical time constraints of running a business, the need to react to short term opportunities or threats, planning for growth, the changing needs of the business and potentially planning for exit.

Businesses need to get things done but don’t always have access to the in house skills or expertise required for projects or specialist activity. If appropriate, our business experts can introduce trusted resources from their network that can jump start new requirements.

What does it cost?

The VNED service is charged on a monthly retainer basis with no long-term commitment and no surprises. The service is designed to deliver on-going value to the MD and the company. The monthly cost depends on the level of engagement agreed and will be tailored to your needs.

Contact Gordon Carmichael on 01276 818125 or gordon.carmichael@hcbusinessadvisors.co.uk to discuss how our Virtual Non-Executive Director service can benefit your business.

6 Important Technological Considerations For A Start-Up

February 6, 2017 By

1. Watch the cash!

Obviously, for a start-up, this goes well beyond spending money on technology, but it’s important to keep it in mind when choosing software.

Where possible, invest in systems that allow you to pay monthly with no tie-in. Even if you feel that your business requires something more bespoke and specific in the medium term, selecting Pay-As-You-Go systems initially can pay dividends. Initial use of a Pay-As-You-Go system will allow you to test your requirements and then purchase a more bespoke solution from a more informed position.

Consider things like dedicated or hosted servers, and shared environments, so that you are not spending money on in-house servers and so on. Rarely are these necessary nowadays, and in fact they can limit your flexibility. The online environments are usually available for a monthly fee as well, and this helps cash flow as well as limiting risk.

If your requirements change, or if the business fails, you are faced with a relatively small write-off as long as you haven’t signed up to long-term support contracts, or made large capital outlays in these early stages.

2. Do your research

Many business owners are not technology experts, and there is no reason why they should be, but there are many vendors who will take advantage of this fact, unfortunately. If you talk to someone who has a software package to sell, you will always find that their system will do everything that you ask of it – sometimes it is only later that you discover that those claims are at best costly, and at worst simply untrue.

This may seem a cynical view, and there are of course many technology vendors who will offer you the best advice and the benefit of their experience, but they will also tell you that there are no shortage of business like those above. The risk that you run, as a non-technical start-up, is that you don’t know which of these categories the people sitting in front of you fall into!

Make sure you research the market, talk to other businesses that you trust and find out what their systems are, or take external advice. When you settle on a solution, ask for reference sites that you can visit or speak to, in order to find out what the after-sales experience is.

3. Keep it flexible

You may well find that your business changes to some extent as it develops – you find some avenues are more worth pursuing than others, and sometimes what you end up doing a year or so in is not necessarily what you set out to do.

Having systems that are suitably flexible, or which can be dropped and changed quite quickly and easily, can keep you ahead of the game. If you have spent a lot of money on large and inflexible system, this can actively hold back your business growth

4. Aim for integration

It can be tempting to take on an assortment of systems to fulfil various functions that you either need, or think you need. Bear in mind that most of these systems will hold, for example, your customer contact details – perhaps in a CRM system and an accounting system.

If any of those details change, they will need to be updated in two places. Quite quickly, this process will fail, and you will find yourself in a position where you have two different addresses for someone, and you are not sure which is the correct one!

It’s not always easy, depending on the systems you need, but it’s worth aiming for the greatest degree of integration that you can manage.

The golden rule is to aim to store every piece of data only once, and then share it, if you can. So you have one core customer or contact record, one central product record and so on.

5. Consider your processes

When you start a business, you will probably have a fixed idea of how you want it to work. Be prepared to learn from the way that the systems you look at operate – by their nature they will be generic, as they are designed to fit the needs of as wide a base of potential users as possible.

In the early stages of your business growth, try and follow these generic processes, rather than being too prescriptive about your own idea of how you want to operate. You will find it much easier to get started, and you will still be able to get orders out of the door one way or another!

There is an adage that you shouldn’t let software control your business, and this is certainly true, but at the same time you should always be asking yourself why you need to do something that is different to the way in which many businesses operate. As often as not, you may find that there is no compelling reason, certainly in the early stages.

6. Plan ahead

Having made the above point about keeping your processes as generic as possible, it is still important to bear in mind where you want to get to in the end. If you are likely to have specific requirements, mobile apps or e-commerce for example, then try and ensure that the systems you are using can support some form of integration with external systems like these.

You won’t necessarily want to spend money on a mobile app at the start (unless that’s your business!) but you don’t want to be in a position where you are prevented from moving forward by a hasty and poorly researched decision made when you started.

In the end, choosing software is always a risk. You may find something better a few months later; you may spend too much because you are not familiar with the market; your business model may change; new technologies and possibilities may become available, and a host of other factors.

Keeping these six key pointers in mind while you are making your decisions may help to mitigate those risks. Like many purchase decisions, there is a balance to be struck, and there is no right and wrong.

We have extensive experience in implementing processes and systems to help you find the right focus for your business. If you’d like to find out more, please feel free to get in touch with me for a ‘no obligation’ chat about your business software and systems at david.hardstaff@hcbusinessadvisors.co.uk or on 07722 605545 .

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