Join the new world

Dear readers,

Company management is a hard business (for the moment) and knowing your profits isn’t easy. I was the first one to make a mistake in my previous article using a false calculator to look at profits. Nowhere on the internet seems to be a decent company calculator that is up to date. I know programming is hard and asks time, and even more if you want to keep it up to date, but I am asking/begging if someone is willing to program one do it. If you need hosting I might know someone that can host it for you.

So, in the meanwhile as a good manager cannot live without a profit calculator, I couldn’t let you without one. Some articles I saw provided a basic understanding on how you could make one for yourself, but I wanted to go even further than that and give you one all made up for you. With the one I am providing you, you can do quite a lot of things (especially that I am providing 2 different !) and I hope you will like and enjoy it. The second one might not work as it is based on Excel Web Queries (API and Excel are not good friends), but more on that later.

So let me present to you the calculator I made. Everyone can make one, but I bet most people are too lazy to do so or just don’t care enough to make one. So let’s start (download links are at the end) :

- The calculator



As you can see above, it is a familiar design for the readers that have followed me since a few months (more than a year now) at the time I published my business tutorial. The layout was the one used by the company calculator you could find on truebluecreations.net . I loved the features it had, especially the different profit calculations, the way to set a profit margin and that it would give you the recommended wages again and so much other stuff. The only thing not included is the export licence calculator, but I am working on that.

So let’s go over some basic features and what you need to do to make it work !

- The things needed

To keep it very short, in order for this calculator to work, you will need to fill in the yellow cells. All the other cells are protected against modifications anyway, but the yellow cells are essential and will provide the necessary data to make all the calculations. So what do you need to fill in? Most of what I am going to say is pretty straight forwards or can be found in comment on the spreadsheet

Current Price : This is the price at which you are selling your products. Be aware you need the price WITHOUT taxes. If you include taxes your profits will be slightly lower.
Profit Margin : the margin you want to apply above your costs. Setting a 10 to 20% margin is a good option and will earn you back your investment in about a month.
Amount of Raw Materials required per unit : Here you need to fill in the amount of RM required in order to produce 1 unit of product. The amount you need to enter depends on the quality of your company and the industry. Here is a summary of it (also in the spreadsheet)



RM Price : The price of one unit of Raw Material in local currency
Exchange rate : how much gold you get for 1 unit of local currency.
Booster : This is the % of the booster your employee is working with. For example for the 0.19 gold booster, you need to enter 50 and for the 0.99 gold booster 200.
Region Bonus : For this go to http://egov4you.info/eco/raw and look up the booster percentage you have. If you country has a grain, oil or an iron region you will have a 25% booster (so enter 25), for food and weapons look above, house and stone companies don’t have a booster at the moment.
Referrer Bonus This is if your worker has a bonus of referring a friend to eRepublik. Often you don’t know this, so just leave it empty otherwise.
Citizenship Bonus : If your company is located on a citizen account enter 25, if on an org enter 0.
Skill : The skill your worker has. Please enter the level and not the amount of skill points he has. The skill level will be in a green box and less than 13.
Wellness : The wellness your employee works at.
Current Wage : The current wage of your employee.

Those are all the things you need to fill in. After doing this you should be able to start using it as a real company calculator. You will see, most of the things are exactly the same as in a normal calculator but it only takes a little longer as I cannot retrieve all the information for you from the API. The call I made at the beginning remains the same : you know how to program? Don’t hesitate to contact me if you want to create a web based company calculator.



Now that all the needed information is in the spreadsheet, what can we do next? Very simple : look at the results. Here again a brief listing of the things the spreadsheet will provide you.

Cost price : cost of producing 1 unit
Rec. retail price : price so that you make no loss (obvious I know)
Daily income : total income if you sell your whole daily production at the current price
Daily expenses : how much you spend daily on raw materials and wages
Daily profit losses : the first one is in local currency and the second one is in gold. You can easily check if you are making a profit or a loss as the cell will turn red if you lose money.
Current profit margin : (income-expenses)/income
Daily product made : amount of products made per day
Break even sells : what amount of products you need to sell per day in order to cover your expenses.
Wage surplus/deficit :Difference between the wages you are paying now and the recommended wages based on the required profit margin.

You can look at all the formulas if you want to know (f.e.) the new productivity formula, but I protected all the cells that are not in yellow in order to prevent someone from changing too much. If you want to, just copy past everything into a new spreadsheet and you should be able to make some changes if you want to.

- Why do you need a calculator

Very simple, in my previous article you could see that companies could eventually make a profit. Having a good and accurate calculator is something essential for this. All web based calculators are outdated at my knowledge so you can better use mine 😃

- The second calculator

I am also providing you with a second calculator. It has one huge other feature that the first one doesn’t have : namely web queries. Web queries allow you to go and retrieve from the internet the data from your own company directly. All it does is a simple copy past of the productivity your workers had during the previous week which will allow you to calculate EXACTLY what your profits are and not estimate it like previously (which only gave daily profits).

So the only thing you need to do is to fill the yellow cells and enter the link to the workers page of your company and hit the refresh data button (under the “Data” tab). The page you get the URL from should look like this otherwise it will not work:



Ho also don’t forget to allow Excel to run macro’s otherwise it will not work. (the warning toolbar).

The only problem with this calculator, is that it can break quite easily and several problems were reported to me that I was unable to solve. All are related to the use of web queries, but we can’t live without them. It doesn’t take away that it is a useful tool that you should definitely check out as it makes your life easier. So the problems that were reported to me and possible solutions are (if you have troubles and solutions please PM me I’ll past them here) :

- The results of the web query moved so that you are unable to use the tool properly. Solving this is easy, go to tab 3 and make sure that “Employee” is located in cell A1 (and A2).
- Older versions of excel don’t have web query, normally windows provides an update to download. It is about 90 Mo thick but installing it should allow you to use it. I am using Excel 2003 so no problems should exist for that version or 2010.
- When you try to past your company link it gives you an error message that you try and past something from a different size : past the link into the formula bar otherwise he will try and past a cell making him go crazy.
- Mac, apparently doesn’t work from what my testers told me, I would say : switch to Windows but that isn’t worth it. What you can do is simply go on the page and copy/past everything making sure that you have something looking like (especially look at the location of the cells).



- The download links

The most important stuff I think for you. I can assure you that all the following links are virus/spyware free. If you do not trust me, feel free to run a virus check before opening it (just downloading shouldn’t do damage).

Here they are. They are all the same, just in case one gets deleted sooner than the other.

http://www.2shared.com/file/BLt-uF-0/CompanyCalculator.html
http://www.2shared.com/file/MN0GKh34/CompanyCalculator2.html
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=O0EFGBZK
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=O0EFGBZK
http://www.mediafire.com/?nmmzipymyiaya

Updated one for the company calculator with the Web Queries :
http://www.2shared.com/file/nzrVvTkv/CompanyCalculator.html


So that was it for today, feel free to leave a comment and vote. If you haven’t subscribed yet do so (and also with your orgs I would definitely appreciate that) and I hope I’ll see you write something underneath my next article!

Cheers,

Apotygma