I am in the process of building an
Each project has a different start-date (as yet unknown) and the units of product need to be ordered with a six-week lead time. Each project has a different duration. When projects occur simulaneously we will need to smooth production as best as possible to keep deliveries to each project steady.
Has anyone designed a similar spreadsheet who might have some helpful hints on how to optimally design this, or a good formula or two that you found particularly helpful? Do I build four different projections and then aggregate them or is there a better way to do this, perhaps by arranging everything in a lookup-table format?
I'm just hoping to get some ideas from anyone who might have taken on this sort of project in the past, to see ways in which I might approach it.
Best design of a spreadsheet for layering of four different projects into one projection timeline
Answers
You could do this using a database approach with pivot table reporting, but that gets a bit advanced. The simplest approach is probably to build a template that accommodates all projects. Make 5 copies. Use one of them to consolidate values from the other 4. Keeping them all identical in terms of rows/columns makes building/managing much easier and more reliable. Look into Consolidate function (Data menu in Excel 2007). Keeping them identical is easier if you use multi-tab-editing (select all tabs when adding a row, for example). Using Range names for things will also help with keeping your formulas tidy and accurate.
Filed Under:
Cash Management