We have eight excel files each containing 12 sheets with 33 names on
each sheet (296 names per file)

The same names feature in each of the files.

We record daily/weekly payments against each name and we are trying to
pull the total  that each person has paid, from the eight files, as we
need to transfer this figure into one new system. We are planning to
manually total all of the entries over the eight sheets but I wondered
whether it would be possible to do this automatically.

Can anyone tell me is it possible to do this and if so how?

Thank you