Accounting Tools

Microsoft Excel: The Accountant’s Best Friend

You can’t find a good accountant that doesn’t absolutely LOVE Microsoft Excel. Besides their company’s accounting software, most accountants use and rely on Excel to do their daily job.

Excel makes complicated functions and formulas a lot simpler and can automate them no matter what input numbers are used. This means less repetitive mathematical calculations for the accountant, but still sheets and sheets of useful data that can be analyzed to their heart’s content. What else does this mean? Simple: Faster work, more accurate work, and less overall stress (that is, once Excel is properly mastered). Who doesn’t want that?!

Excel is compatible with hundreds of other software programs, so importing and exporting data is made super easy for someone using more than one software program at a time. For example, export a bank statement and sort by date, or amount, credit or debit, or description, or something else – and make bank reconciliations that much easier. Or upload a list of items from Excel to QuickBooks and save hours and hours of data entry work.

Once data is set up, if done correctly, it can be sorted upside, sideways, flipped around to see all angles and from every perspective. How does this help? Sometimes trends are difficult to find if you’re looking at it in only one way. Changing the perspective from which data is viewed might highlight some information you previously missed. Excel let’s you do that without re-entering the material manually. This is particularly useful in analyzing large amounts of data with numerous facets.

Tons of data can be overwhelming to the average person, so correct formatting and communication is important when presenting large quantities of data. Whether using numerous types of charts (bar, pie, line, area, scatter, doughnut, bubble…) or tables, viewing data can be made pretty and simple – the way most people like to see their numbers. Visual aids in presentations are more credible and a lot more professional.

Microsoft Excel is one of those things in life that if you don’t use it, you don’t even know what you’re missing out on. But once you learn it, you wonder how you ever lived without it. Accountants, however, can’t live without it. We use Microsoft Excel in at least half of all our Accounting Specialist courses at Community Care College. This way, our students learn accounting high-level concepts and apply them in this “go to” software. From basic to advance Excel tricks, our Accounting Applications course covers it all. Click here to find out more!