«… VBA code, several 10_000 lines, to be analysed and to be ported to another language, essentially to get rid of the Excel files…»

Coincidentally I inherited two such similar projects some years ago. Project #1: About some hundreds of VBA macros grown over many years and spread over several departments in the customers company. We failed extracting and porting them and hence we decided to do a total rewrite of all the stuff in Perl, PHP, Flex and Transact SQL. 5 years of hard work. OK, several releases etc. Project #2: Similar situation. After I explained my experiences with project #1 to the customer he gave up. Respectively he switched to SAP. Which is the same thing. Good luck and best regards, Karl