Nu Skin: Financial Statement Importing Automated with VBA

Executive Summary

Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. is a publicly traded (NYSE: NUS), multi-billion dollar, direct selling and multi-level marketing (MLM) company that was founded in 1984 in Provo, UT.  Nu Skin sells and “distributes more than 200 premium-quality anti-aging,”[1] beauty, and nutritional products.  Since their founding in 1984, Nu Skin has grown and now operates in more than 53 international markets and employs close to 4,000 individuals.[2]

Nu Skin works with hundreds of thousands of distributors who market and sell their products.  Nearly all of Nu Skin’s sales revenue comes from these distributors who sell and market these products directly to potential customers throughout the world. 

Since Nu Skin operates in so many foreign countries, taxes can become complicated, since more than 40 separate filings must be completed globally.  Furthermore, since each CFC (subsidiary of Nu Skin operating in a foreign country) is a different size and utilizes different accounts, importing the financials to be used in preparing the US tax returns can be very difficult.

I built a tool that greatly simplifies the process of importing the financial information so that it can be summarized and adjusted for the tax forms.  The biggest problem with importing data is that when one or two accounts are added in a given year, the links to the cells in the financials will all be displaced by one or two rows.  This results in someone manually looking at each link to see that it is properly linked and then manually adjusting the ones that aren’t correct.  In essence, my tool will do all of that work for you, analyzing the accounts that had balances last year and ensuring that those accounts are linked correctly when the new financials are imported.  It will also highlight the rows where new accounts were added so that a user can quickly find what accounts need to be linked.  The result is that accountants will now be able to seamlessly import the financials and get to work on making tax adjustments and preparing tax forms instead of getting frustrated with Excel because of the difficulty of manually updating all of the cells.  In addition to reducing headaches and frustration, this tool would save the intern or employee working on the 5471 filings an estimated 40+ hours per year.

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[1] http://www.nuskin.com/content/corpcom/en_US/company/corporate_press_kit.html

[2] Same as above

Here are the links to the files I used:

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15w/jantsen/Final_Project.xlsm                         Project Workbook

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15w/jantsen/Financials_1.xlsm                         Dummy financials to import

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15w/jantsen/Financials_2.xlsm                         Dummy financials to import

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15w/jantsen/Final_Project_Write-up.pdf             Write-up