What we do
Put simply, our main aim at Matrix9 is to make your life simpler/easier/quicker, by automating the everyday tasks that take time out of your day, to allow you to focus on the things that really matter to your business.
Having run small teams in large companies, and also having run our own small business too, we know that admin-style tasks need to be done – but they often suck up people’s time for little or no reward. And even though they are often repetitive and therefore ideal for automation, budgets for ‘proper’ bespoke IT solutions simply aren’t available.
That’s why we use the tools already at your disposal in Microsoft 365, and by harnessing their often-hidden functionality, such as the magic of VBA, we can reduce time spent on the repetitive tasks that occur in everyday business. By letting your PC do the heavy-lifting, it can save time (often lots!), reduce errors, and maybe even make you and your staff a little happier in the process!
And because we use the tools you already use in your business, it means we can:
- develop stuff for you really quickly
- do it with no extra infrastructure to implement
- at a much lower cost than ‘standard’ IT projects
- often with little/no on-going support requirements
If you run a small team, or a small business, we can probably help automate some of your processes, saving you both time and hopefully money as we do so.
The types of things we can do are almost endless but include:
Automating tedious copy and pasting
Are you forever copy data from one Excel spreadsheet into another? Or receiving data in one format and then having to reformat for your own requirements. This is exactly the type of process that is easily automated, to both save time, whilst also reducing human error.
See examples >>
Automating repetitive emails
Do you find yourself frequently sending the same/similar emails to your clients or prospects, with just a few key data minor differences? Maybe you cut and paste all the time from old emails? With our tools it’s easy to read a bit of bespoke data about the client (maybe from a DB, maybe from an Excel spreadsheet), and quickly send out personalised, yet pre-set emails, saving you time and effort. It’s certianly better than cut & paste
Copying data from the web to Excel
Did you know it’s possible to get Excel to automatically ‘scrape’ data from websites. Maybe it’s stock prices, or ForEx rates or wather data. Or whatever. If you are copying it from a website and pasting it into Excel then that can almsot certainly be automated. (And if then re-format it that can be automtated too!)
Simplifying and improving Excel spredsheets
A lot of the work we do is in Excel. A lot. That’s because Excel is already semi-automated, in that formulas help to automate a lot of tedious calculations. But we can take your Excel spreadsheets to the next level. Using in-built tools such as array formulas, Power Query and the VBA programming language, we can atke Excel from simple spreadsheets to fully integrated standalone apps that can be the cornerstone of your day-to-day work
Automating repetitive emails
Do you find yourself frequently sending the same/similar emails to your clients or prospects, with just a few key data minor differences? Maybe you cut and paste all the time from old emails? With our tools it’s easy to read a bit of bespoke data about the client (maybe from a DB, maybe from an Excel spreadsheet), and quickly send out personalised, yet pre-set emails, saving you time and effort. It’s certianly better than cut & paste
Copying data from the web to Excel
Did you know it’s possible to get Excel to automatically ‘scrape’ data from websites. Maybe it’s stock prices, or ForEx rates or wather data. Or whatever. If you are copying it from a website and pasting it into Excel then that can almsot certainly be automated. (And if then re-format it that can be automtated too!)
Creating magic in Microsoft Office with VBA
All Microsoft’s Office products (Excel, Outlook, Word etc) come with their own, semi-hidden programming language, VBA.
Using VBA we can harness the power of computer programming to do truly ‘magical’ things iwth your Office apps. By using logic code, adaptable loops, and other coding processed it’s possible to make repetitive tasks complete in the blink of an eye.
VBA works across Office apps, so Excel can interact with Outlook, Outlook can read data from Excel, Word can create documents based on data in Excel tables, etc etc.
And VBA works also can operate at the Windows level, so you can, for example, get Excel to perform Windows tasks such as copying/creating/deleting folders and files.
Basically, you can do it in Office then VBA can probaby do it too – just waaaayyyy more quickly (and probably more accurately too)
Automatically copy & reformat Excel data
The data you receive often isn’t in the format you want it, and you have to manually manipulate in Excel. This is where,VBA, ahem, excels. For example, get the data from your bank download, and have Excel reformat it, read the data and then automatically apply relevant supplier and costs codes, plus VAT rates – all with a single click
Create emails based on Excel data
We had loads of times when we have had to send an email (or emails) based on Excel data. Maybe we had to send the same report once a week (or even once a day). Or maye we held data in Excel, and had to send a different email for each line of data (likewise for each record of data in a DB). This could get pretty tedious pretty fast – but with VBA it can be automated to the single click of a button. Simples
update business info directly from data on the web
It’s not ususual to have to use data from the in your day-to-day business. If you are frequently accessing the same data then why not automate the proces? For example, we have set up spreadsheets used to provide quotes to non-UK firms that could auto-update the daily ForEx rates and thus automatically calcualte the quote in the relevant foregin currency. It might have only saved a bit of time every use – but it was being used daily, and it was also 100% error free (which wasn’t always the case before…)
Creating windows folder from an excel list
As business grow, so does their filing. Have you even had to produce eg 5 folders for 5 different department, each with several identical folders underneath, such as months of the year? So have we, and we know what a pain it is to do in Windows explorer. So we built an Excel spreadsheet with VBA to do it for us – simply type the folder names (once only) and a single button press does the rest. It’s been a real time saver – every FY we have to set up a loads of new folder trees, and this is our go-to solution.
Using advanced Excel techniques to create business- critical data apps
If you use Excel regularly then you are probably aware of what it can do – Excel formulas, are, for many, the first introduction to computer programming (at least, they were for me).
But by harnessing advanced Excel techniques, we can query data from multiple sources, link to other Office products, and create what otherwise might have to be a standalone bespoke app (with all the cost that would involve).
Examples include:
- automated bookkeeping tools
- business enquiry tracking tools
- data centralisation tools (pooling data from various sources into one)
- business dashboards
- stock control systems
Create Excel dasHboards
Excel has very powerful chrting features, as well as advanced data querying tools. Meaning it’s perfect to pull together data from various different sources (be that other spreadsheets, DBs, or even scraped off the web) and presewtn is visually for easy, instant interpretation
Take control of your sales data
Sales data is often held in Excel. But there’s so much you can do with it once once it is there. Automatically reformat it and send it in an email. Automatically send emails to relevant team members based on the values in the data. Create different views otf the data to be consumed by different teams/department/clients. If you can think it we can probably automate it for you!
Managing sales enquiries in Excel
We’ve built a business critical app that is uses to track holiday sales and availability, and auto-generate the key booking emails that turn enquiries into a sale. It’s a one-stop shop to quickly see where sales are vs targets.
Create pdf invoices via excel
For smaller business, Excel can be a great invoicing tool. And we can set it up to auto-generate unique invoice numbers, save the files with unique PDF names and in bespoke folders as needed – all at the touch of a button.
Already have an idea of a possible project?
If you’ve got an idea of a possible project, drop us a line with your thoughts, and we’ll get straight back to you. At this initial stage you can be as brief or as detailed as you like, and we’ll respond with some initial ideas. And of course, there will be absolutley no commitment on your part.