bmickel said:
I am using MS Office on a G4 w/ OS 10.3.9. Got 1.25 GB RAM, and I want
to utilize using this suite to help me get my business going "better".
I am a mapping consultant that creates quotes and proposals, for
hardware, software, and services. I want to be able to automate the
process of adding an item or deleting and have numbers automatically
add up etc. Does anyone doing any of this type of consulting or know
someone who can help?
You will find it amazingly easy. Teach yourself.
I, ‹ with a *bit* of help from my missus ‹ ran a reasonably sized
software and systems business with Word and Excel as the main quoting
and invoicing tools. We had a massive Excel spreadsheet for receivables
and payables, cash flow and general financial planning. For payroll
however we used a commercial package. It was too much trouble to keep
up with all the reporting malarkey the government required.
We were forced to use external auditors by the government. In the end,
our auditors were using our system for other clients with similar
businesses.
I'd do the narrative part of quotes in Word and use Excel for the
detailed breakdown of hardware and software. Naturally I had templates
for each, which I simply added to as the business changed. Like you, I
guess, we had a fairly small number of high value invoices, so we could
afford to take the time to make sure everything was perfect and
beautifully presented. We'd copy and paste into the cashflow monster
and use it to pay VAT (European sales tax) on a quarterly cycle, as
well as doing bank recs, chasing debts and paying certain suppliers at
the last possible moment. ;-) An awful lot of business processing is
really very simple, and you can go a long way using very simple tools.
Of course the invoices were the Excel spreadsheets that were once the
quotes. Even our orders and remittance advices to suppliers were near
cousins of the same quote spreadsheet.
Hell, some of our invoices went to huge companies running SAP. Their
SAP service charges were far far greater than my company's gross
revenue, but our management processes were far better and cheaper than
theirs. I'll be the first to admit that our system would not scale, but
I derived perverse pleasure from submitting an Excel generated invoice
for consulting work for showing them how to work round the messes
created by bits of their SAP.
I used the mail merge facility for sales pitches, and lots and lots of
Excel in generating beautiful looking reports. (We hated writing report
software so much, we taught selected customers our Excel skills and had
them generate their own from much raw-er data. They saved money. We
saved hair.)
If I have one piece of advice, it would be to do nothing too fancy. It
is far more efficient to do what you are good at, and pay an accountant
or book-keeper to do the boring stuff. Nevertheless, do enough yourself
so you keep a clear view of the cashflow. Start simple and keep it that
way.
