Need Excel Expertise

[D Nice]

So I belong to an organization that has in excess of 500 Chapters around the world. I am doing some research to see if Excel would meet my needs for a specific project. I need to be able to gather financial information from all the Chapters and was wondering if Excel would be a good platform to utilize. We are looking at using Quickbooks, but it is very expensive and labor intensive. Also, many of the people I work with have no familiarity with QB, so I am looking for other resources like Excel that I could possibly use. Please advise.

 

[alansidman]

It depends on what type of information you are gathering and what you plan to do with the information. Could you expand on your plan as to what type of information you will glean and what you plan to do with it. Excel may be the answer or Access or similar DB may be the answer. With what you have told us, it is difficult to respond yes or no.

 

[D Nice]

So Chapters are supposed to report various financial information points. Account Balances, Balance Sheets, Expenses, and such. The National office is looking to use Quick Books to gather this information, but again, most people are NOT savvy to QB, so I decided to look for more cost-effective and easier to use platforms.

 

[Burrgogi]

So Chapters are supposed to report various financial information points. Account Balances, Balance Sheets, Expenses, and such. The National office is looking to use Quick Books to gather this information, but again, most people are NOT savvy to QB, so I decided to look for more cost-effective and easier to use platforms.

You still haven't provided enough information about your project. Do you want all 500 chapters to have access to the same workbook and be able to enter in various data such as the account balance? If not, then how much control do you want to give them? Just viewing privileges only? Who will be maintaining the spreadsheet? Just 1 person or many people involved?

Since you are dealing with chapters that are in different parts of the world, you need to come up with the proper solution that allows those international chapters to access the workbook when they need it. Excel is not suited for this kind of suited for this unless you store the Excel workbook onto a central server or file sharing website. Again you have not provided enough details about how much access they need and what level of access you wish to give them.

Any application you choose is going to require a learning curve. It doesn't sound like your members are computer savvy. If Quick Books is too hard to learn, how do you expect them to learn Excel? Is might be slightly easier (maybe) but it really depends on what you plan on doing with the data.