Excel Activity

This week we looked at a spreadsheet of profits of an office supply company. Here are their numbers before we considered changing anything.

After looking through the the numbers, there are four categories that lose money, Bookcases, Tables, Rubber Bands and Scissors/Rulers/Trimmers. Of those four, Bookcases, Rubber Bands and Scissors/Rulers/Trimmers are in the bottom 4 of amount sold. We think it would make sense to discontinue selling these products, as we don’t sell many of them, and we lose money on every sale. Tables are in the upper half of number of things sold, but we lose the most money on selling them. We can’t speak for the behalf of the company, but they seem to do much better with electronic office supplies, rather than furniture and miscellaneous office items.

If the company wants to continue selling these negative-profit items, they should try packaging them with profitable items to increase their sales. For example, while tables don’t do so well, chairs make about $100K for the company. They should try to package chairs in with tables in some sort of deal that will allow them to sell more chairs to improve their chair profit, and slow the bleeding of their monetary loss from tables.