Reports and analysis from Excel: a guide for shops and practices
How to pull the important numbers out of your management-software exports, without pivot tables, without formulas and without uploading company data to a foreign site.
Rawboard4 articles
The data is already there; reading it is the missing part
Management software produces long reports: sales by day, stock, orders, consultations. They usually end up as Excel or CSV files, are opened once and stay in a folder. The numbers that matter (what sells, what doesn’t, who sells, how this month compares with last month) are in them, but they are hard to get out without pivot tables and formulas.
The guides below show how to get those numbers more easily: how to build a sales report from an export, which indicators are worth tracking monthly in an optical store, how to compare two months without formulas, and why, when a report contains customer or employee data, it is safer to keep it on your own computer than to upload it to an online site.
The examples use made-up data and work with any export. Some steps can also be done in Excel; where it helps, I show how Rawboard does them, my app that reads reports locally, offline.
Articles in this guide
RawboardHow to build a sales report from Excel or CSV, without pivot tables
The steps for a sales report from an export, the traps that corrupt the figures and how to get the result without pivots or formulas.
Rawboard7 indicators to track monthly in an optical store
Sales, average order value, category mix, coatings, conversion, remakes and sales per consultant: how to calculate them from an export and how to read them.
RawboardHow to compare two months from an Excel export, without formulas
The difference, the percentage change and the change per day: why a 31-day month cannot be compared directly with a 30-day one, with an example.
RawboardWhy your company report should not be uploaded to just any online site
What an export from your management software really contains, what the GDPR says about sending it to a third party and a checklist before uploading it.