Getting Access to Spreadsheet Models for Managers

Spreadsheet Models for Managers

Perhaps an example will drive these points home.

Let's suppose that you run a venture capital firm. Every month, you collect financial data from all your portfolio companies, and create a high level summary of the condition of your portfolio. Because of the complexity of the process, it's beyond the capability of your administrative staff, so you assign this task to several staff analysts.

This is a fairly laborious activity, and although analysts are less well-paid than partners, they're still not cheap. They're also capable of higher-level work than collating data. So you decide to have each company submit its financial data using a standard template. You then write a command macro for use by your administrative staff. It collates all the templates, computes the indicators that you use internally to monitor your portfolio and the companies themselves, and adds the data to various charts and graphs for presentations.

In effect, the macro lets you shift the work from analysts to administrators. This frees up the analysts to do work that might be higher value to the firm. Moreover, most changes in the collation procedure — such as the introduction of a new ratio indicator — are invisible to the collation macro operator, so no training is required to support this kind of change.