Multi-site spreadsheet reporting for operations managers
By the Analistable team · Updated · 2 min read
Operations managers collect the same report from many places—sites, shifts, teams, projects—and need one view: hours against budget, stock by location, project status, order fulfilment. The core jobs are stacking per-site files and joining them to a master list. This page lists those jobs and the guides for each.
The weekly roll-ups
| Job | Files | Join key |
|---|---|---|
| Labour vs plan | Weekly timesheets per site + rota or budget | Employee ID + week |
| Project hours vs budget | Timesheets + project budget sheet | Project code |
| Status roll-up | One project tracker per team | Stacked, keyed by project ID |
| Stock by location | Branch inventory counts + item master | SKU |
| Ticket load | Support ticket export + account list | Account ID |
The difficulty is rarely the maths. It is that ten sites fill the template ten slightly different ways: renamed columns, extra header rows, dates in two formats. Fixing those is most of the work in any method.
How Analistable fits
Load the site files together and ask, for example, "hours by site this week against the rota, sites more than 10% over first". Analistable stacks files with matching columns, joins them to the plan on the shared key and returns the table. Saved models let you reload next week's files and ask again.
For a fixed, monthly pipeline with stable templates, Power Query's folder import is a good choice. Analistable is more useful for the questions that change week to week.
A good first step is to agree one header row with every site and keep a site column in each file. That small change makes any method, from copy and paste to SQL, far more reliable.
If sites send files with a different number of header rows, the combining files with merged header rows article shows how to normalise them first.
Start here
Frequently asked questions
- Can it combine files where columns are in a different order?
- Yes. Files are matched by column name, not position. Renamed columns need a quick rename or an instruction in your question.
- Will I be able to tell which site a row came from?
- Yes. Ask for the source file or sheet as a column, or add a site column to each file before loading.
- Does it update automatically when sites send new files?
- No. You reload the new files into a saved model and re-run your questions. Nothing is scheduled or stored server-side.