When you are a supplier of technical equipment, for example special machines, you never encrypt the same thing and our encryptors are generally quite keen on IT and more particularly Excel.
The encryption solution is obvious since it appears on all users' workstations in the person (so to speak) of Excel. All you then need to do is configure the solution to meet the needs of the business.
How to prepare an Excel environment to make quotes?
Where to start as the task can seem daunting?
We must first return to the fundamentals of the company, which is to generate a margin from the costed operation. You must be able to measure this margin in the different compartments of the estimate and be able to measure it from different angles.
The overall quote margin is the difference between the cost price and the selling price. It is expressed as a coefficient: 1.2 or as a percentage 25%. We can measure it globally on the estimate or apply different coefficients to cover contingencies, exchange rates if we work on exports, general costs, etc.
The cost price is generally made up of 2 types of costs :
- Direct costs which are directly linked to the costed operation, hence their name
- Indirect costs which represent the costs that the company must bear to carry out the operation.
The margin will be applied to these costs to calculate the selling price.
Make complex quotes in Excel?
When the operation is complex, for example the supply of a production line or a building, it is generally necessary to divide the project into tasks. In fact, the customer will want to compare your offer with that of one or more colleagues .
It will therefore either impose a decomposition on you to facilitate comparison work, or leave you free to divide the project as you wish.
The first case is much more restrictive than the second.
It will therefore be necessary to calculate the cost of the project per task and no longer overall . Above all, you will need to provide a sales price for each task . In general, we work with the client's Excel file and their price study sheet to make the reports, but it is quite tedious for amounts with more than five zeros.
Excel offers all the decomposition possibilities, but it will be necessary to integrate the control functionalities , because for this part the software does not have an integrated proposal. For example, we can use conditional formatting to check that two sums are equal.
Price study in Excel: mistakes not to make
However, be careful when setting up a costing tool in Excel not to make certain errors.
It is well known that the implementation of such a tool costs nothing , neither in development nor in maintenance. Indeed, the software being installed by default on most machines one might think that it is free, but this is not the case .
In business costing services, it is not uncommon to find yourself with an Excel spreadsheet for each estimator, because everyone has their own very personal approach and vision of their job. In this case, it is complicated for a sales department to compare quotes with the same analysis .
Take into account the relevance of the data, because the absence of databases in Excel (Access, still exists in Office, but who uses it?) can easily result in different prices on the same item even in a only quote .
When you entrust the development of an encryption tool to your salesperson or encryptor: where and how and where does your work as developer of the tool stop in relation to its original mission (sell or encrypt depending on the case) ? Is this new mission well-framed and will not encroach on its results and those of the company?
Finally, the biggest difficulty is ensuring the transition to another expert when the person who maintains the encryption tool decides to leave the company and why not with the company's data. Who will ensure the transfer of skills to your other collaborators and correct the inevitable errors that any software, however sophisticated it may be, contains?
There you have it, you have some essential notions to get started and develop a beautiful costing tool in Excel. Good luck and above all good figures.
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