WHAT'S UNIQUE ABOUT EVERYDAYEXCEL'S EXCEL BUDGETING COURSE?

Different from the courses in the market focused on creating financial model, EverydayExcel Business Lab's Excel Budgeting Course is specially developed to help companies consolidate data from multiple files (e.g. by department, country, division) efficiently and generate reports and charts for analysis and presentation. Our experience tells us that that consolidating data from various sources efficiently is an important process preceding the analysis of the company budget and the development of a highly effectively financial model.

Companies that did not understand the difficulties in data consolidating went ahead to acquire a budgeting system, only to later realize that they had to continue to suffer the same old pains in budgeting.

We understand your frustrations and have designed our Excel Budgeting course to help you put behind you the pains of linking cells between and across workbook and worksheets. After attending the course, you no longer need to worry about linking errors, accuracy and large files caused by the cell links.

Our unique approach to data consolidation helps to retain the all raw data which is useful for detailed analysis of the budget. You are also freed from the fear of users inserting and deleting rows in the template because our approach is able to pick up the changes intelligently and you also do not need to worry whether all the new rows are included in the consolidation. The risk of human errors is significantly lowered.

The experience you gain from this course would be different from anyone else in the same class, as every participant will have the opportunity to work on your own templates in the second part of our course. The benefits of attending this consultative course (Part 2) are:

• Freedom to ask questions related to your own template without having to share it with the class
• Get help from the trainer as and when you need it
• Increase your confidence in maintaining the template you have created when you back at your office.

How Our Course Help Shirley In Payroll Forecasting

Shirley (not her real name), who works in Human Resource department of a consumer electronic company, has benefited from this part of the program. She is in charge of the quarterly payroll forecast for a company of 500 staff. Each quarter, she has to calculate the monthly amount the company has to pay each staff in terms of basic salary, CPF, overtime, allowance, etc. In total, there are about 15 salary components that she has to calculate, organized into one component in worksheets for the 500 staff. The forecast is pretty straight forward if there are no staff movements across departments within the company, no resignation, and no new employees. If one staff is transferred to another department, she would have to do "cut and paste" for the 15 worksheets and somehow freeze the salary in the previous months so that the new department does not bear the salary cost of this staff before the transfer. If there are 10 staff movements, her work will be 15 times more because there are 15 worksheets to work on.

When this is done, the 15 cost components for each staff have to be allocated to 5 business divisions, depending on the contribution made to each division. This means that for each staff, she has to work on 75 rows (15 salary components multiplied by 5 divisions). So for 500 staffs, she has to work on 37,500 rows (75 rows X 500 staff). The allocation is done manually and the numbers are entered manually into another worksheet, with the help of another assistant.

When she came for the course with her workbook, we suggested reducing the number of worksheets to 3. In the first worksheet, all the salary components of the 500 staff would be presented, meaning that each employee name would appear 20 times (15 salary components plus 5 spare rows). In this worksheet, there would be 10,000 lines. She also learnt how to insert rows in 3 simple steps and then let Excel take over (without using Macros). In the second worksheet, she created a template containing the cost allocation of each staff to the 5 different divisions. In this worksheet, there were 2,500 rows. And in the third worksheet, there were 50,000 rows, presenting how each salary component was allocated to the 5 divisions.

With some more extra formulas and WITHOUT using macros, she managed to reduce the 50,000 rows in the third worksheet to about 20,000 rows. As a result, we managed to save another 60% from the time taken to calculate 50,000 rows (since Excel needs to calculate only 20,000 rows instead of 50,000 rows). Using the third worksheet, Shirley could now create a pivot table report that allowed her to analyze the payroll forecast much more accurately and efficiently.

If you want to be like Shirley to be able free your time up to work on more value-added activities such as analysis in your budgeting exercises, sign up for our Excel Budgeting course now!