Application for business graphs

[blue-eye-boy]

I need a aplication or program to help me set up graphs for business products. I'm in business with my dad and we want a program that can help us identify what spesific products generate most income and what products not. To be exact it is a butchery, and we need a graph for these products mainly: beef, chicken, lamb, home-mades, etc. Now each day as we order these from the suppliers, my mom will put the weights into the program, so at the end of each week and month, we can see how each one did, if our beef products did better than last week or month, and so on.

Now I know I'll be able to do it with excel, but isn't there a easier application that can handle that? Or how can I do it in excel?

Thanks in advance.

 

[DJ...]

Without spending an arm and a leg on unnecessary BI applications, this is a job for excel. And it's very simple.

You'll need to input the values into the data portion of your spreadsheet with appropriate headings and importantly, dates. Then add your own "performance" calculations and run a pivot table and pivot graph on this data.

You can set up standard templates so that when the weight is added to the chicken column, for example, it works out the cost, associates a profit margin, does a vlookup for last week's volume and this week's forecast, percentage of turnover etc. You can also set it up as a macro and click a button to have all your calculations performed. You could just input all the weights, click a button and the graphs will appear.

It's difficult to give you specific advice without you telling us what exactly you're trying to calculate. So for example, is it the weight of stock bought or stock sold you're interested in? Why not set up a single database to handle all stock control, and then link it to your finances? These kinds of things can really help you and they're not all that difficult to set up. They are time consuming though. You could have a stock control system that manages the stock from order to bank, which then links the resultant data to your financials...

 

[blue-eye-boy]

It will be weights purchased, thats the only exact way we can see whats been sold at the end of the day. I knew excel can do this, I was just hoping there is a simpler way. Can you maybe just guide me in the right direction to lookup excel's help menu, on what topic(s) will I find what I need to do this? I'm afrikaans so the english topics is sometimes a bit confusing to me. Thanks so far.