Every 2 weeks, Natalie has to spend 2 hours after her workday on Wednesday to prepare for a 30-minutes meeting with her colleagues from other parts of the world. With our help, 2 hours became 10 minutes. The 1 hour 50 minutes saved was then spent bonding with her 3 children, helping them with their homework, or even enjoying a short movie with them on Disney Plus.
Natalie is the director of APAC region in a global consultancy company, managing consultants assigned to projects billed in USD, EUR, AUD, and SGD. Every biweekly, Natalie has to prepare a presentation for the HQ on the regional performance.
Natalie used to have a excel sheet with 13 tabs, 1 tab for each month, and 1 tab for “presentation calculations” where she would copy the total revenue for the past 2 weeks, or the whole month, and then converted them to USD, EUR, and SGD for easier comprehension for the C-suite leaders, as well as the directors of the other regions.
Her table looked something like this:
| Project Name | Currency | Amount |
| Project A | USD | 15,000 |
| Project B | EUR | 9,000 |
| Project C | USD | 4,500 |
| Project D | AUD | 900 |
| Project E | SGD | 3000 |
| … | ||
| Project L | EUR | 6,500 |
After 2 hours of work, Natalie usually ends up with a table that is something like this:
| USD | EUR | SGD | |
| Total Revenue | 55,122.00 | 48,286.40 | 71,374.57 |
Natalie’s process:
- Since the currency of every row is not the same, not all rows needs to have the amount converted. Natalie started by grouping the rows by the currency.
- She calculated the subtotal in each currency
- Converted them into one currency (USD/EUR/SGD) by Googling the exchange rate and then multiplying the amount.
- Summed them up in to one grand total.
- After getting the grand total, she has to converted the grand total to 3 currencies again.
The process was quite straightforward and Natalie tried to minimize mistakes by using the excel SUM function to reduce manual calculation. However, the biggest headaches were when the numbers don’t seem to tally.
Natalie often wonders:
- Did I accidentally exclude a row from the SUM function?
- Did I group a row in the wrong currency?
- Did I multiply incorrectly for the currency conversion?
- Where did I go wrong?
With error carried forward, it is usually faster for Natalie to redo than to pinpoint and fix the problem.
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