Calculators
Calculators are one of the most common tools built with spreadsheets. For example, you might have an ROI calculator for your product or service that you want to share with your customers. Sure, you can send them the spreadsheet as an attachment, or link it to your website so that it can be downloaded. However, this is less than ideal for a number of reasons:
If you need to update the ROI calculator, you have to deal with the fact that you have out-of-date copies out there. It’s virtually impossible to track them all down and make sure they are replaced with the updated version. With NExS, there is one version of the truth. Your actual spreadsheet is never exposed, so when you update it, you can be assured that no one has an outdated copy.
It’s highly unlikely that a visitor to your web site will make the effort to download your spreadsheet, open it, enter data, and take action on the results. 55% of visitors to a web page spend less than 15 seconds on the page. If you can’t engage them in less than that, you’ve most likely lost them. NExS apps are designed to be embedded directly on your site, visible to visitors as soon as they hit the page. Nothing to download, nothing to open. Interaction with the calculator takes place directly on your page, greatly increasing the chances of engaging your visitor.
Your ROI calculator probably contains proprietary data and formulas that you don’t want your competitors to see. You simply can’t protect information contained in a downloaded spreadsheet. All NExS calculations take place on a secure server. Spreadsheet formulas and proprietary data are never exposed.
Case Studies
NC Clean Energy Technology Center
The North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center advances a sustainable energy economy by educating, demonstrating, and providing support for clean energy technologies, practices, and policies. It also administers the Database of Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency (DSIRE), a resource providing financial incentives and policies. To educate stakeholders on costs and benefits of clean energy technologies, they’ve built calculators using Excel. Faced with the challenges of shared spreadsheets outlined above, they looked to NExS to provide a solution. With NExS, they are able to easily adapt their spreadsheets for individual constituents, avoiding the prohibitive costs of traditional app development methods.
Wilson Energy
Wilson Energy, the municipal utility for the city of Wilson, NC, wanted to provide a level of service to its customers online that would match that of large regional providers. One such service is electric rate usage calculators to help customers understand and reduce their utility costs. As a small city utility, Wilson did not have the resources in house to build custom rate calculators. NExS provided an affordable solution. They’ve since expanded their repertoire of NExS apps to include water usage, commercial rate calculation, and scheduling of home energy audits.
iPro Healthcare
iPro Healthcare needed a tool for their field sales representatives to show prospective customers the ROI for their hospital order management system. Using actual customer data, they had built a sophisticated spreadsheet model to predict the ROI based on a number of variables such as number of beds, procedures performed, etc. They needed a solution that could be easily updated as the data was refined while providing one version of the truth for the entire sales team. Protection of the underlying data and spreadsheet model was imperative. They started with javascript-enabled PDFs, but found that to be very cumbersome to maintain, requiring manual translation of the Excel formulas to javascript fields on the PDF.
“Your tool resolved all these issues and gave our presentations the full impact we were looking for. It is easy to deploy, the data is calculated quickly and accurately, and we can display only the results while housing and protecting all the background calculations on the same spreadsheet. This is a superb product.”
— Keith Beason, Marketing Manager, iPro, Inc.