Spreadsheet imports into Business Central: How a productivity building app helps streamline critical processes for two mid-sized businesses

With any solution, users often need additional specialist functionality. However, with Business Central, there are loads of apps listed in AppSource to meet specialist needs. The great thing about apps is that the makers manage the maintenance and updates, making them a cost-effective way to problem solve highly specific problems.

In this post, we’ll look at how our Excel Importer app for Business Central eases the burden of uploading spreadsheets into Business Central. We’ll look at how two mid-sized businesses have used the app to:

• Scale up their spreadsheet imports quickly.
• Dramatically reduce the time it takes to manage journals.
• Improve visibility of key business metrics, like stock levels.
• Improve Board reporting.

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Excel Importer’s secret sauce: What mid-sized businesses love most

Before we dive into how these businesses were successful, let’s take a quick look at the features of Excel Importer that businesses love:

Templates: Using the flexible templating system to predefine the mapping of the Excel columns to Business Central fields. This is what really speeds up spreadsheet importing.  The mapping is done once instead of needing to modify the file every time you upload – saving everyone time.

Error management: If there are any mismatched fields, it returns a list of all errors rather than asking the user to resolve them one by one. Also, it automatically removes blank lines from the upload.

Multi-format: Excel Importer handles more than standard spreadsheets. It can also import CSV and tab delimited file formats.

Free trial: Excel Importer is easily downloaded from AppSource. A free trial comes as standard.

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Streamlining a critical business function: Financial services

When your finance team relies on manual tasks to underpin your financial operations, those processes can come under pressure – and this can be a challenge to handle, even more so when just one, already busy, person is responsible for the task. This is precisely where streamlining a process using spreadsheet-importing apps can help save your team time, maintain data integrity, and reduce stress.

Park Square Capital is one of Europe’s leading private credit firms, managing over $12bn USD of capital on behalf of its investors. When the business rolled out Business Central, the actual time cost of uploading spreadsheets, invoices, and personal expenses for 100+ staff became clear. Using the built-in configuration package required hours of additional work each week.

So Park Square Capital adopted Excel Importer and easily set up their import templates. The results stand out – using Excel Importer is up to 90% faster than the built-in tools.

For the full story, check out this post.

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Improving visibility and reporting: Food supplier

Understanding storage and handling costs for each product line is critical when you have hundreds of products on your books. The accounting team at Hawkins Watts receive a weekly multi-page invoice from their third-party logistics provider. This was entered manually as one summed entry into Business Central. But as a result, it missed the detailed storage and handling costs per product range.

The team manually calculated expenses to compensate for this and provide visibility to the Board. This was hugely time-consuming and carried the risk of data-entry errors.

Now using Excel Importer, Hawkins Watts uploads large data files quickly. Thanks to Excel Importer, board reports are prepared in minutes because the source files are readily available. And the risk of data-entry errors is removed.

For the full story, check out this post.

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Spreadsheet uploads into Business Central: Key functionality for mid-sized businesses

Mid-sized businesses are increasingly looking at getting more out of their Business Central investment. Companies want to streamline critical business tasks to save time, reduce errors and improve reporting.

Something as seemingly small as a spreadsheet importing app, such as Excel Importer, can make a big difference to business productivity. It easily manages the mapping of data to Business Central fields, has better error management, and supports Excel, CSV and other data imports. This app will give your business access to functionality that will supercharge your investment in Business Central.

Click through this short tour or sign up for a trial here.