These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Business Broker Searches

The first time I bought a home I went to a realtor for help. The reason was simple. Using the MLS directory, the realtor had easy access to information about every home available for sale in the area. With this information and a basic understanding of my needs, a realtor could quickly narrow my search down to a few homes which saved a lot of time and increased my chances of finding the home that I wanted.

I have an acquaintance that is a business broker and he tells me that unlike for the sale of homes, there is not a single place to go for one stop shopping to buy a business. If what the broker has available for sale does not meet the buyer’s requirements, then one of the parties must begin the long and tedious process of finding a suitable business. Essentially this boils down to visiting multiple websites that advertise businesses for sale, entering specific criteria, running a search, and manually sifting through the results. If a business looks promising the broker will do some simple financial calculations to further verify that the business meets minimum thresholds for consideration.

The purpose of this project is to make the broker’s search more efficient by providing a single entry point for the business search from Excel. This will not take the place of existing web sites. From the list of results the user will be able to click on a hyperlink that takes them to the actual listing on the web.

Additional requirements / benefits of this solution are listed below.

  • Simple user interface that provides a single point of entry for searches
  • Broaden search and pull data from the top websites as defined by the business broker
  • Automatically calculate financial ratios and display results in Excel
  • Hyperlinks back to the actual listing on the web for additional data
  • Configurable settings to filter data to be displayed

Writeup

Excel File


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