Now that there's a thing of beauty, to my eyes. A man who sees the benefits of a better way and who has a solid plan and a desire to accomplish what he wants.
I've used exactly the approach that you've described (with different data sources, naturally) with great success, saving hours of detailed, tedious, meticulous and stressful work over the long run.
The best advice that I can offer is to invest in your budding skills. Lock yourself away for a weekend or two and get yourself off to a good start with VBA with one of John Walkenbach's Power Programming books for your version of Excel. They're excellent resources that I used to go from "I think I can do this" to actually accomplishing fairly complex tasks within just a few weeks.
You (and your boss) will be amazed at what you can accomplish and contribute. And these days, that should give you a decided edge.
