Business software on Excel templates

Welcome to Managing Smart – Business Software on Excel templates

More than promoting theoretical advices or being a “wise couple of words”, Managing Smart is committed to put together management experiences encountered within various business environments and to offer practical solutions embedded within business software on Excel templates, meant to efficiently solve real challenges that managers face in their activity. The goal of Managing Smart is to promote a set of management tools (applications) that rise their value from being:

» Fit for purpose – going straight to the core of the problems and giving solutions.

» Easy to use (with little or no special training needed).

» Based on user’s standard IT set-up, with no need of further software installation.

» Decently priced and affordable

Managing business – whether from Top or Middle management positions – requires, among other skills: planning, organizing, staffing, leading and controlling resources.
Apart from his background, experience and professional abilities, a good Manager relies on efficient management tools, often transposed into Business Software, that empowers him to understand data and facts, to monitor them, to predict and influence their future evolution.
Could it be simple, complex, Excel templates or specialized software, management tools reach their goals in the extent that they contributes to justify the Management Decisions and to ground them on reality.

 

A brief comparison

Specialized Business business software-2software

Being different in most of its characteristics versus Excel templates, a specialized business software can be broadly defined as a complex application designed to assist in managing of certain processes or functions within the business. Being specialized for a specific purpose, it usually has an ergonomic user interface, specially designed for the task it performs. Its limited flexibility often constitutes an advantage, by forcing the user to stay within an agreed framework. A good business software is highly efficient within its area, it is scalable and can be often a part of a highly performant integrated solution. But all come with costs, the most important being: high acquisition price (proportional with its complexity), high effort for setting and maintaining a tailored IT infrastructure, training and maintenance costs and many others.

Excel excel templatestemplates

The management tools based on Excel templates won and secured their place within the business environment long time ago, pretty much from the moment when they emerged on the IT world. In our days they are simple to use, affordable and highly flexible, can be build with a reasonable effort, have decent data storage capacities – enough to handle a small database and, not the last, they have an impressive calculation versatility, so powerful that very few users can claim they use even a tenth of it. Excel templates are broadly used as management tools for completion of various tasks and it is very difficult to imagine how various management activities could be carried by a business, without Excel templates.

 

Business Software on Excel templates

Many opinions tried to predict for a long time ago the death of the Excel templates for business use, at the exchange of specialized business software; nevertheless, a more balanced approach might find out that most of the time, the two alternatives are complementary. Whilst no one can ever imagine an integrated ERP emerging from Excel templates, other type of difficulties may also appear when considering implementation of expensive specialized software in situations where it can not meet the cost efficiency, or where the speed of change and high versatility are a must. In a colored projection, fighting against heavy tanks works best with missiles, but if lions were to attack you in the jungle, you’d leave your missiles in the warehouse and just take the sharp Winchester. Why? Because a few well aimed bullets will do the job that all your expensive artillery would never have the precision to do.

When comparing the two solutions, the final goal is to choose the proper management tools for specific processes and within the costs constraints of individual situations, then squeeze them in the benefit of the business.

Combining concepts of the two alternatives, a business software on Excel templates would combine some advantages of the two components. The solution consists of a business software raised from specialized Excel templates, consistently linked together by a user interface. Where suitable, the result is sometimes a better featured application and always a less expensive solution than a traditional business software.

Developing the concept does not come handy, given the limited programming capabilities of an Excel template, the “Spartan” user interface elements available and other technical constraints. However, if properly developed, the resulting application can manage inside very complex algorithms and methodologies, well above a traditional business software, doubled by the impressive calculation versatility of Excel templates. And all those are available at a fraction of cost.

You can learn more about management tools build around business software on Excel templates on the following pages and you can test demo versions as well.

How to budget for a business
Budgeting techniques
Main elements and concepts

How-to-budget
Budget planner software
Budgeting methods
Download Demo

Budget-planner
Performance Scorecards Builder
Manage Key Performance Indicators
Download Demo

Performance review template