Ray Bullen and Associates has developed a number of Excel solutions that automate the input into and extraction of information from ATTACHE.

Ray Bullen and Associates has been involved with Attache software for over 20 years and has setup Attache for a wide variety of industries over this time. As the principal, Ray Bullen, is a chartered accountant with over 39 years business experience, he brings this experience together with the extension Attache experience to assisting clients to develop robust and efficient accounting solutions.  

As Attache provides strong import and export opportunities, Ray Bullen and Associates have developed solutions using macro driven Excel spreadsheets to dramatically improve efficiency and accuracy in reporting.

Importing into Attache 
A number of my clients have had needs to get information into Attaché from other systems on a regular basis. I use Excel as a tool to facilitate this. Attaché has a wonderful facility to get information from other systems into Attaché being the KFI (Keystroke File Import) facility.  

Perhaps a few examples might help to explain this.

One client, a recruitment agency with a large number of contractors on assignment, had another tailored system which contractor timesheets were entered into and which automatically produced invoices. In other words they couldn't process a timesheet without producing a sales invoice, an excellent internal control in their business. The problem was the other system was terrible at Debtors control and had no payroll facility at all! We therefore electronically brought in the weekly data from the other system  via Excel using the KFI facility to load the sales transactions in as well as the payroll data. There was approximately 600 sales invoices and payroll transactions (timesheets) each week loaded electronically. This generally took less than 5 minutes. Attaché therefore did the Debtors control, general ledger reporting and paid the contractors through payroll.

Another client who is a manufacturer has an external package has a bill of materials production system. This system co-ordinates the amount of raw materials needed to manufacture based on the sales order. This system has an order entry system up front to summarise the required sales that drives the manufacturing and sales orders were keyed into this system. However all sales invoices were raised in Attache. Previously they were manually re-keying in the order information into Attache as an invoice. With KFI they now transfer the data electronically (via Excel) that loads the sales orders into Attache from which invoices are then produced resulting in a massive saving in time.

In each case Excel is used as it can read text based files and use a macro / formulas to translate the information into the required format for the KFI system in Attache.

Exporting from Attache

Attaché is now quite good in exporting to Excel, however some reports don't format well in Excel.

An example is a client using Excel from an output from Attache. I have a client where the GL produces a number of project P/L reports - around about 70 different P/L's! This is produced via the General Ledger report called Budget Variance. This reports shows month to date and YTD reporting against budget as well as the annual budget. The format unfortunately is quite poor in Excel so the client outputs the report to an Excel file that I have developed where a macro formats the 70 different P/L's (which vary in length each month and this is what created the difficulty for the client) into their board report format. 

The file is approximately 7000 rows long and the macro re-formats the entire report in less than 1 minute. To do it manually took the client over 2 hours and they might need to alter the report 3 or 4 times at the end of each month when reviewing the results and making month end adjustments. Hence this was a major time saving macro for the client.

For further information regarding how we could help you use Attache better please contact: