Excel reporting you can hand to anyone and trust the numbers.
An Excel consultant covering the North West, building and rebuilding workbooks so the formulas are auditable, the totals reconcile, and nobody's afraid to open the file in case they break it.
Rebuilding a workbook nobody quite trusts any more.
Most Excel work I do isn't starting from a blank sheet — it's an inherited workbook that's grown one exception at a time: a formula someone patched by hand for one bad month and never fixed, a hidden column holding the whole thing together, a total that's been slightly wrong for so long everyone's stopped checking it. I take that apart, understand what it's actually meant to calculate, and rebuild it so it does that reliably.
- Formulas that reference a cell three tabs away with no explanation
- A total that doesn't quite match the sum of its own rows
- Hard-coded numbers sitting inside what looks like a formula
- Only one person understands how it works, and they're not always available
- Formulas laid out in a logical order, with the working visible
- A totals row that always ties back to the detail underneath it
- Inputs kept separate from calculations, so nobody edits a formula by accident
- A layout anyone on the team can follow without asking who built it
Signs your workbook needs rebuilding, not just patching.
- Two people run the same report and get two different totals.
- You've caught a wrong figure before and are no longer sure it hasn't happened again.
- Only one person in the business can safely make changes to it.
- Adding a new row, product or month means editing formulas rather than just typing data.
- It prints badly, or looks fine on screen but confusing on paper or in a PDF.
- Conditional formatting relies on colour alone, so a colour-blind reader can't tell good from bad.
Conditional formatting and variance that reads correctly for everyone.
Colour is useful, but colour alone is a trap — it disappears in black-and-white print, and it's meaningless to a colour-blind reader. I build variance and status formatting so the meaning is always carried by more than colour.
Signed numbers and arrows
A variance shows as +6.9% or −4.1%, with a direction arrow, not just a green or red cell. The number and the symbol carry the meaning, so the colour is a bonus, not the whole message.
Print and PDF checked
Reports are checked in greyscale and on paper before they're handed over, not just on your screen — so the version that reaches a board pack or a client still makes sense.
Excel is often the right answer — here's when to move on from it.
I won't push you towards Power BI because it's more impressive. Excel is the right tool for a lot of real work, and moving something to Power BI before it needs to be there just adds complexity.
Stay in Excel when…
- It's a model people need to type figures into, not just view
- One or two people use it, in the same layout each time
- The data is small enough to sit comfortably in a workbook
Move to Power BI when…
- Several people need their own filtered view of the same report
- Someone is manually copying data into the workbook from a system every week
- The file has got slow, heavy, or genuinely too large to work in comfortably
What you get at the end of a piece of work.
The workbook itself
Yours outright, with a clear structure — inputs, calculations and outputs kept apart so it's obvious where to look for anything.
A short guide to the formulas
Plain-English notes on what each key formula does and why, so a colleague can pick it up without needing me on a call.
A reconciliation check
Confirmation that the totals in the new workbook agree with the source data, so you can trust the handover from day one.
Not every job is a full rebuild.
Sometimes a workbook mostly works and just needs tidying — removing dead formulas and unused tabs, fixing one specific calculation, standardising formatting across sheets, or adding a totals check that flags itself if something stops reconciling. Clean-up work is quoted the same way as a full rebuild: a fixed price, agreed before I start.
Send me the workbook you don't quite trust.
I'll take an honest look and tell you what's actually going on with it, and whether it needs a full rebuild or something smaller — free, and no pressure.