DO YOU RELY ON SALES CALCULATIONS IN SPREADSHEETS?

For many companies, calculating the right customer-specific cost price and sales price is a major challenge. If you supply a large number of products, a minor calculation error can ultimately have major consequences for your margin, and thus can impact your profits! How well do you have your sales prices under control?

Spreadsheets and the bottom line

For many companies that deliver customer-specific products or services, the CRM and ERP systems are not suitable for calculating the precise and correct prices. That’s because there are many more issues involved in determining the right cost price and sales price than these systems can handle. For an accurate and complete calculation, calculation rules, conditions, limitations, customer-specific agreements, and so on must be utilized. Spreadsheets offer a temporary solution to deal with this – ‘temporary’ because spreadsheets ultimately pose unacceptable risks.

The risks of spreadsheets

If you have experience with building and maintaining spreadsheets, then you know that it doesn’t take much to get lost in your own formulas, particularly if you must modify a spreadsheet that you built some time ago. And let’s not even mention spreadsheets that others have built. An error in a formula is easy to make and is not easy to discover or to pinpoint later. The use of spreadsheets for making sales calculations, therefore, is a major risk!

A spreadsheet is not yet a quotation

A quotation is often followed up by a modified quotation. Comparing quotations is nearly impossible if they are prepared in a spreadsheet, even though it is important to easily see where the differences lie. An effective quotation consists of not just figures, but also an accompanying text. That becomes extremely difficult, particularly if you prepare quotations a multiple languages. Overwriting spreadsheets in quotations texts can easily lead to costly mistakes.

Sales calculation with Sofon

Sofon was developed for recording and maintaining complex sales calculation models. Using Sofon you prepare quotations quickly and easily based on these models that offer a good overview and management of the logic and prices. Issuing new versions is easy. Old quotations can be easily modified based on new models. Documents can automatically be generated in the right language. The management can be carried out by multiple people and the relevant knowledge is safely anchored.

Certainty of the right margin

More important than easily maintaining and efficiently generating quotations, however, is the certainty of an accurate sales calculation, precise and correctly calculated margins and in turn the certainty that each new order will make a positive contribution to the bottom line.