Portfolio

Scenario #1

For some solopreneurs and small business owners the thought of tracking expenses creates an overwhelming sense of dread and panic…but it doesn’t have to be a stressful situation. If you aren’t quite ready for a more robust bookkeeping system like Quickbooks or Xero, this personal and business expense tracker might be perfect for you.

A client came to me with boxes of receipts and just needed them organized into something that would show income, business and personal expenses for the last few years, with room to add future years also. I created this easy to use format that captured all the data on one tab (Figure 1), provided various ways to view the data using pivot tables (Figure 2) and then summarized everything by category on a separate tab (Figure 3). Both she and her accountant were very pleased with the results and the format is very manageable for the extremely busy season she is in.

Scenario #2

Do you have a form you are filling out by hand, that someone else then must input into the computer, that then must be emailed to a client for them to print, sign and return, which then gets scanned back into the system and saved for tracking purposes?

That’s what one of my clients was dealing with recently! He had a form that his sales people needed to fill out manually, which then had to be calculated and entered electronically so that the orders could be placed in the system. It was taking way too much time and effort, and there was always a chance for errors in calculation which could result in mis-quoting the customer or causing costly mistakes on the production side when orders had to be redone.

The client decided to move to an electronic version of the form but needed what the sales people entered for the orders (Figure 1) to translate into layman’s terms for the Customer Estimate Form (Figure 2). I added some features that allow the data on the Customer Estimate Form to expand as information is filled in on the order form without showing rows and rows of blank data. The customer is now able to electronically type their acknowledgement of the quote onto the sales persons’ computer, where they then save the file by customer name/number, the data is already electronically entered for processing in the system and the calculations all happen behind the scenes, so there is no longer a need for any manually entry, scanning, printing, etc.