Nadia was already a keen user of Excel and had developed a good collection of annual, monthly, and weekly spreadsheets to track and manage her business - everything from staff rotas, holidays and hours, takings from the till, the gaming machines, and lodgings, her business plan, annual profit and loss and more.

The problem she faced was that keeping these spreadsheets up to date was taking a lot of her time, and to make matters worse, the same financial Information often needed to be entered into multiple spreadsheets for differing purposes.

One of the improvement opportunities we identified was that some of the pieces of financial information (like takings through the till) were already available in her electronic cash register system, so it should be possible to import this information directly.

So I wrote software that automatically searched through her ECR reports to find the information she needed, converted the data formats to those needed by Excel, and then populated this data into her weekly tracking spreadsheets in moments.

Similarly, each monthly workbook would automatically update itself from the information in her weekly workbooks, ensuring that all the information in them was correct and consistent, and without requiring copy/pasting or re-keying of any information.

After these changes, the workbooks largely updated themselves for anything going through the till, saving Nadia hours of tedious admin every week, and leaving her time to attend to everything else that running a successful pub requires.

It wasn't necessary to redesign / or rebuild her workbooks, it was just an upgrade to enable her to continue working in exactly the way she always had, but with a little automation to make the process run in seconds and be error free.