Automation

Spreadsheet automation services

The report your team rebuilds every Monday, running by itself instead — with Power Query, VBA or Apps Script, whichever will still work in two years.

Get your Excel job done

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What we automate

The four patterns that cover almost every request

Recurring reports

Weekly and monthly packs generated on a schedule
Consolidation across branches, entities or regions
Automatic distribution by email or Slack
Snapshot archiving so history is preserved

Data ingestion

Power Query pipelines over CSV, XLSX, SQL and REST
Deduplication, type coercion and key normalisation
Schema-drift detection that fails loudly
Incremental refresh for large sources

Data entry and validation

Forms that write straight into the workbook
Validation rules that reject bad input at source
Auto-numbering, timestamps and audit columns
Duplicate detection before the row is written

Document generation

One invoice, quote or certificate per row
PDF export with per-file naming rules
Mail-merge to email with attachments
Batch printing and archiving

Is it worth automating?

Run the numbers before you spend anything

The honest test is arithmetic, not enthusiasm. Take the minutes the task takes, multiply by how often it runs in a year, multiply by the number of people who do it, and convert to cost at a loaded hourly rate.

A 20-minute report produced every week costs roughly 17 hours a year. Put your own loaded hourly rate against that and you have the annual cost of doing it by hand; compare it to the quote and the payback period is arithmetic. The same report produced quarterly costs 80 minutes a year — automating it would take a decade to pay back, and we will tell you not to.

Two effects the arithmetic misses, both in favour of automating: the error rate on manual consolidation is not zero, and a wrong number that reaches a decision costs far more than the time saved. And the person doing the retyping is usually the person who could have been analysing the result instead.

The signals that you have crossed the line

Someone has a written checklist for producing a file.
The process is documented as "ask Marie, she knows".
A step exists only to fix what the previous step got wrong.
The report is late whenever one specific person is away.
Two teams maintain the same numbers in two places.

Choosing the right tool

Power Query, VBA and Apps Script solve different problems

Power Query — for getting data in and shaping it

If the work is extract, clean, join and load, this is the answer, and it is built into Excel. The steps are recorded once and replayed on refresh, the file stays a normal .xlsx, and the transformation is inspectable by someone who is not the author. It handles the unpivoting and type coercion that formulas do badly.

VBA — for driving Excel itself

Formatting loops, generating one workbook per row, printing, custom dialogs: work that manipulates the Excel object model rather than the data. It is not the right tool for fetching and reshaping data any more, and a macro-enabled file carries real distribution friction in locked-down environments.

Apps Script — for anything that must run unattended

Time-driven triggers run in Google's cloud whether or not anyone is logged in. That makes Apps Script the right home for nightly imports, scheduled emails and threshold alerts. The six-minute execution limit is the main constraint, and it is worked around by batching. The full comparison is in VBA vs Apps Script.

And sometimes: stop using a spreadsheet

If ten people write to the same file concurrently, or you need row-level permissions and an audit trail, the honest recommendation is a database with a spreadsheet front-end, not a cleverer workbook. We would rather say that than sell you an automation that papers over it.

How the engagement runs

From the current manual process to a running automation

1. Describe the manual process

Walk us through what someone does today, step by step, and send the files it touches. The checklist you already have is a perfect brief.

2. $49 a job, delivered in 24 hours

We confirm the payback maths, propose the tool and quote a total. If the numbers do not justify it we tell you that instead.

3. Build, with failure handled

Validation, logging and loud failure are part of the build, not an extra. You get told when something upstream changes rather than discovering it in a report.

4. Handover and revisions

Documented triggers, inputs and maintenance notes so the automation is yours. Revisions included; full refund if it does not do what the quote said.

Automation FAQ

What to settle before committing to an automation project

What is worth automating and what is not?

The arithmetic that decides it is simple: minutes per run, times runs per year, times the number of people doing it. A 20-minute weekly report costs about 17 hours a year, which pays back at almost any salary. A quarterly task that takes ten minutes does not. We run that calculation with you before quoting, and we do say no.

Will automation break when our source data changes?

It breaks less than a manual process does, provided it is built defensively. We validate column names rather than positions, fail loudly with a message instead of writing bad numbers silently, and log every run. The failure mode you want is an email saying "the export gained a column", not a dashboard that has quietly been wrong for three weeks.

Do we need a macro-enabled file?

Often not. Power Query and dynamic-array formulas cover a large share of what used to require VBA, and they work in a normal .xlsx that email filters and SharePoint will not quarantine. We reach for VBA when the job genuinely needs the Excel object model, and for Apps Script when the work should run on a schedule.

Can you automate across two different systems?

Yes — that is most of the work. Pulling from an ERP export, joining it to a CRM extract and publishing one reconciled report is the common shape. Where an API exists we use it; where the only output is a scheduled CSV drop, we build against that and make the ingestion tolerant of format drift.