| Looking At Customer Locations on a Map with the Use of Yahoo Pipes Richard Torian September 17, 2009 One way in which companies might benefit from using Yahoo Pipes is to map sales-related data on a Yahoo-generated map. Data in accounting systems can often be exported to a spreadsheet. Once sales-related data is in a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet can be published on the web as a website, Yahoo Pipes is able to pull the sales data from the published website and filter and manipulate the data. One way in which this sales data can be manipulated (assuming that geographic information is in the data) is to assign geographic attributes to the data so that sales information can be shown by geographic location on a Yahoo Map. Click here to see a map that shows the locations, by zip code, of customers accounting for recent company sales. Data on this map was obtained initially from a company QuickBooks file. Sales reports in QuickBooks can be easily exported to an Excel spreadsheet. Once data is in spreadsheet format, the spreadsheet can be published as a website. Then, Yahoo Pipes is able to fetch (retrieve) this data, and then filter and manipulate the data such that results as the location of customers by zip code can be seen on a Yahoo Map. Although data from a QuickBooks company file was used to generate the Yahoo Map in this example, data from any accounting system that can be exported to a spreadsheet could be used. Mapping sales data on a Yahoo Map, using Yahoo Pipes, I believe is a good example of a way in which the Internet can be used to help business decisions makers. No fee is required to use Yahoo Pipes. The only cost is in the time spent to set up the Yahoo Pipes application. Thereafter, refreshing the Excel spreadsheet with new data will refresh the Map display automatically. Further work is planned to find other ways in which combining data out of accounting systems can be used in Yahoo Pipes to produce useful output for accountants and decision-makers. Please click here to return to the Management Accounting Information Center front page. Please click here to send an email with comments on this article. |