Monarch is a software program that is nothing short of magical. That’s right: magical. Why? Because it can make the complexity in your job disappear so that you can focus on what you’re good at, what you enjoy, and what you really need to accomplish.

Who needs Monarch?

If you’re an accountant or an auditor, you need to focus your efforts on big issues, like identifying errors, or finding the tell-tale signs of possible fraud. What you shouldn’t need to do is spend your time feeling like you also need to be a database expert, or meticulously pouring over reports many hundreds or thousands of pages in length. You’ll find that your work is more efficient and accurate as you won’t be re-keying report data into a spreadsheet for further analysis.

Maybe you monitor inventory levels of raw materials or finished goods for a manufacturer, and you are constantly looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack as you attempt to reconcile your period ending inventory levels per your computer system to the actual piece counts recorded. With its ability to integrate data from multiple sources simultaneously, Monarch can be a terrific tool for you, allowing for easy filtering, summarizing and even multiple level drill-down facilities.

Perhaps you work as an IT specialist, and are already skilled at deriving and manipulating data. You can take advantage of all of Monarch’s features for your ETL (extraction, transformation and loading) needs. You’ll be hard-pressed to find an easier tool to work with, even if you can write your own program code. When you’re moving data from a legacy system to a new application, Monarch can be invaluable and indispensable as it saves you countless hours versus programming based solutions.

Working in the collections field, you’ll find that Monarch is wonderful for helping you to spotlight the accounts that need your attention so that you don’t accidentally overlook one.

In today’s medical industry, much has been computerized already, but many people are working with the information found within PDF files, such as is often used with patient billing and insurance systems. But what if you need the data that appears within that PDF for a different system? Instead of re-keying it, use Monarch to extract the data from within the PDF file. You’ll have 100% accurate data in seconds.

How does Monarch know how to extract the data from my report?

You teach Monarch what data you require from within the report, and where Monarch can expect to find what you’re after. This process is called “building a Monarch model“, and can often be complete in just a few minutes. You can then save the model for later use, so that you don’t have to teach Monarch about your report all over again.

Then when the data changes in your report the next time you run it, you don’t have to make any changes to your model. Just open the report in Monarch, apply the model, and in seconds you’ll have extracted the data so that you can analyze it or export it as needed.

What data sources are supported by Monarch?

Monarch can extract data from:

• Report files, such as ASCII or ANSI text files, like those exported or downloaded from large ERP systems, or even small accounting packages
• Web page documents (HTML or ASP),
• PDF files,
• Log files

Monarch can connect directly to database sources such as Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, older formats such as dBase or Paradox, Lotus 1-2-3 files, and delimited text files, such as csv files. Alternatively, you can use larger database systems with Monarch via its ODBC and OLEDB connections.

Where can Monarch send the data that it extracts and creates?

Monarch can export data to many of the same file formats from which it can acquire data, as listed above.

I’m pretty experienced with Excel. Why should I use Monarch when I can do all I need with Excel?

Do any of these points sound like the work that you do regularly?

• Do you use (and fight with) Excel’s text to columns feature? Stop wasting your time. Use the right tool for the right job. Use Monarch.
• If you connect data sources with Excel’s lookup functions more than just a few times within a workbook, you’ll be amazed at how much time Monarch’s high performance calculation and data importing engine will save you.
• Monarch’s ability to seamlessly inherit previously defined complex calculations for other works you’ve created just isn’t something that you can do easily with Excel. Plus, you can set it to instantly apply any changes you make in a master calculation to all of the models that refer to it. Just try doing that with Excel.
• Using Excel’s auto-filter tool makes it simple to narrow your search in large data sets. But how easy is it to handle multiple criteria? And how quickly can you switch the entire scenario? Monarch lets you do this so quickly and easily that you’ll wish that you’d been using it for years.
• Do you use Excel’s pivot tables? Whether you do or you don’t you’ll love Monarch’s summary feature.

When can I use Monarch?

When you need to extract data from an existing application or a file, you can do it better with Monarch.

When you re-key information from one source into another, you can do it better with Monarch.

When you review large documents for vital information, you can do it better with Monarch.

When you combine information from multiple sources into a single document, you can do it better with Monarch.

When you perform any calculations with your data, at either the detail or aggregate level, you can do it better with Monarch.

Do Even More With Monarch!

Once you’re comfortable with Monarch’s basic features and abilities, you can work faster than you’ve ever imagined as you can automate Monarch to perform your work for you. I’ve even prepared free tools that can help.

You’ve got plenty to do in your workday. The demands for your time and attention only seem to increase. Working in today’s information age means that you need to pretty adept, but sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in a technology trap feeling like you have to be some kind of data or IT specialist to get what you need.

You don’t have to be. You really don’t.

Stop working for your data. Make your data work for you. Excel with Monarch.