Your Painting Business – Excel Spreadsheet – A Great Tool!

Do you like to save time? Do you like to have your phone ringing with customers calling? Of course, who doesn’t want these things?

Just as you have to spend money in order to make money. You need to spend time to learn to save time.

Spend a little time to learn how to use Excel and you will save time and have more customers. Excel can be an unpaid personal assistant.

Some of the things that I use the Excel Spreadsheet for are to calculate square footages, lineal footages and total them instantly without errors. Even if the list is 25 items long, it will calculate the totals, without error in seconds. I use it for calculating square footages from the length and width of the room. I can take a list of rooms and add their dimensions, hit enter and the calculations are done for ceiling square footage, wall square footages, moldings, including baseboards, crown and chair railing. I can even make an additional factor for high time difficulty, or any other factor that can influence the job.

The second big use of the Excel Spreadsheet is my direct mail campaign. I use the spreadsheet along with MsWord to create a mail merge, the two programs work together to print addresses directly on flyers, post cards or envelopes. I can print 10,000 names in a few hours. There is no need to print labels and then have to stick them on your mailer.

Another use for the spreadsheet is to do job costing. You can keep track of your painter’s hours and compare those hours to the hours you used to calculate the estimate for the job. Enter the painter’s names in the first column, you can then enter to rooms or job names in the first row. Then in each column under the room name put the hours or you can break it down further, putting the separate items like walls and molding/trim and keep track of the hours spent doing individual items.

Of course there is always the profit and loss statement or spreadsheet with all expenses, which you give to the accountant. Using the spreadsheet to keep track of company expenses is a good use, and again you can use the “AutoSum” feature to keep totals. One nice thing about Excel is that if you change a figure in the column or row that you are totaling, the “AutoSum” will automatically adjust the total to reflect the new figure.

So whatever uses you find for this program, you will find that it saves time and energy to do these repetitious jobs. And it will do things like adding or multiplying correctly and with ease.