The world's media commonly casts all consultancies in poor light, but that's because it chooses, somewhat conveniently, to lump all consultancies together. Our structure, our operation and our delivery set The Business Spreadsheet Consultancy far from both that crude stereotype and other everyday consultancies. In short, in contrast to many consultancies, we deliver both a tested, robust product and crisp, efficient service to our customers on time, on budget and to specification without disruption of either the clients staff or business operation.

To outline the service we offer listed below are a handful of questions commonly asked by new clients together with our answers and following this, a brief description of the path of a typical project.

Why should I use The Business Spreadsheet Consultancy?
We are most commonly used to bring spreadsheet development skills and expertise to an organisation which either it doesn't possess those skills or where it does have the skills but where they already committed on other projects. Drawing upon our skills allows your organisation to develop quickly, efficiently and with a guarantee of the costs incurred and final product performance.
Increasingly, organisations which have skills akin to ours in house and available for use are also drawing upon our services. In these cases we offer the client the opportunity to analyse afresh previously identified problems, and bring a different portfolio of skills and broader outlook to bear on the business issues that arise.

Don't consultancies cause business upheaval and disruption?
Some may, Management and IT consultancies for example commonly promise impressive performance improvements but only after charging significant fees and then demanding major structural and technical changes to the organisation for which they work.
One of the many attractive features of our service is that our products can have a substantial impact upon an organisations operation and performance almost immediately without requiring a structural change, new IT infrastructure or training etc. Indeed many of your employees need never know we were involved in the project.

Aren't consultancies expensive?
Some are, and indeed some even pride themselves on the magnitude of their fees. Typically the more expensive consultancies are those that have state of the art city centre offices and hence need to charge fresh university graduates out at $1000/day, but that's not the case with us. We are a niche consultancy in an out of city location. We employ genuine experts who have proven, in both this and complimentary fields, that they can deliver a consistently high quality product and service.

To conclude, we have outlined the events that might take place during a typical bespoke development project by The Business Spreadsheet Consultancy. Inevitably, since no two projects are the same, there is no fixed path, but we have extracted the key phases of a common project in an effort to cover the main themes involved.

In generally one-to-one contact is initiated by the client after learning of our service. In most cases our clients are in different countries and time zones to ourselves so face to face meetings are less common and by far the bulk of communication is performed by email and telephone.
As emails are exchanged and phone calls made, we frequently discover that the client's requirements have some elements in common with our past experience, be that data entry, analysis or display and where this occurs the initial phases of project specification and conceptualisation are immediately significantly advanced.
It is not unusual for our clients to expect a solution to be developed rapidly and that is one of the elegant features of service, we can very quickly develop bespoke solutions for a broad range  business issues.
Sometimes our client has a simple tool already in place, but requires a solution which is more powerful and robust, on other occasions a solution must be developed from scratch. Our first step in either situation is to develop with the client a clear understanding of the project requirements and hence this is frequently the most intensive period in terms of communication between ourselves and our customer.
Only once we have a good solid understanding of the project requirements can we submit a quote for the work required. As always, our attention to detail is paramount since we have a strict company policy of delivering on time, on budget and to specification. This policy is a cornerstone of our consultancy as it places all technological and execution risk with us, and rightly so since we are the experts and so gives our customers maximum business certainty.
Once a quote is accepted and the instruction to progress is received, work begins.
We present our work in progress to customers regularly. This ensures that both parties full understand the subtleties of the solution being developed and minimises the project's exposure to misunderstandings etc.
Typically, somewhere between two weeks and two months after the initial approach we submit the final solution to the client. It will have been thoroughly tested in house and already seen in various phases of development by the client and will come with operating instructions, telephone support and, if deemed necessary by the client, training and backup.
During the implementation a new spreadsheet inevitably teething issues may arise and where they occur we work to resolve them quickly and efficiently to ensure our client is operational with their new technology on time and to specification, every time.

Please contact us for more information.