subject: Top 7 Uses For Excel In A Gift Basketry Business [print this page] Working from home can be a dream come true in many ways, but not everyone is mentally prepared for the sheer amount of bookkeeping involved. Thankfully, the powers that be have provided us with Microsoft Excel. If you're trying to be a part of the nation's growing home gift basket making wave, here are a few tasks that Excel can help you with.
Inventory
Gift baskets come in a huge amount of varieties, and so gift basket makers have to keep track of hundreds of different elements from baskets to liqueurs to plastic wrap. Excel can track your current inventory, alert you when your levels get low enough that you need to order more of something, and even anticipate your needs for next month.
Basket Costing
With all of the various parts that can be put into a gift box, it can be a paper nightmare trying to figure out how to fill out a basket without driving the price so high that no one will buy it. With Excel, you can track a basket's cost to you by adding items from a prebuilt set of pulldown menus.
Basket Stuffing
Though it's a bit abstract, you could easily assign a rough 'bulk' to each item and use the same pull-down menus to give you an estimate of what other items you could fit into an increasingly-stuffed basket.
Order Tracking
A simple template will allow you to keep track of all of the details of each order in such a way that they're easily searchable by name, date, paid/unpaid, shipped, or any other detail you care to name.
Recontacting
With the Email alert system that Excel offers, you can send an automated Email to a customer a specific amount of time after their last order -- say, 50 weeks later -- to remind them of how successful their last order was and encourage them to do it again.
Marketing
Every company needs to get it's name out there, and the ways that you can do so are legion. With Excel, however, you can keep track of how much you spend on each marketing effort and the amount of return you got on your money -- so you know how to spend it most effectively in the future.
Supplier Tracking
There are always many places to get your supplies from. Keep an Excel database of potential and real suppliers, and you can take a half-hour out of each week to call each and check on sales or specials, making sure you always get the best deal you can.
Starting a gift basketry business is potentially a lot of fun -- the art and creativity involved is fulfilling on many levels. If the back-end paperwork is intimidating you into not jumping into a venture like that yourself, remember this: a little training in Excel goes a long way toward making the venture a much simpler process.
by: Jen Morrison
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