Stop watching FX swings
Written by Jason on August 14, 2010Repetitive, yet simple, tasks are often some of the most annoying – like waiting in a checkout line at the grocery store. They take up valuable time that could be better used elsewhere. At the end of the task though, you’ve gotten something accomplished – you have your groceries. Would you be more frustrated if you waited in the line, yet only got to purchase items 10% of the time?
This isn’t a hypothetical question – it happens all the time when analyzing data. There are many kinds of analysis that demand frequent, repetitive tasks to keep them updated. However, unless certain (and uncommon) conditions are met, no further action will be taken. It seems like this is an area that is ripe for automation.
Tuhunga can significantly improve your productivity in these kinds of scenarios. Let’s take a foreign exchange example where your company is based in the US, and sells in Europe. You want to make sure your prices are competitive with local European vendors, but want to maximize your profits without losing market share. The biggest short-term factor is the exchange rate between the US dollar and the Euro.
Both the absolute exchange rate and how quickly it has changed over the last week and month are important to you. If the Euro is $1.30 today, you know you are competitive down to a rate of $1.20, and at $1.40 you can raise your prices again, but you also want to know if the exchange rate moves 4% in a week or 6% in two weeks.
Today, you track these figures by entering them into a spreadsheet daily. When the rate meets one of the four criteria listed above, you spend an hour generating a comprehensive currency report that not only covers the Euro, but other major currencies as well. It’s a simple task that normally only takes 5 minutes a day. But add up those minutes, plus the time generating the report, and you’ve spent almost 40 hours per year!
Tuhunga will handle all of the mundane details for you – getting the exchange rates, emailing you when any of your criteria are met, and automatically sending you a customized and updated report like the one below.
Click the header to sort by a different column.
If you’re interested in building your own, check out our Tutorial #3, which steps through the process of creating reports that are automatically generated when a filter’s criteria are met.
