Excel invoice templates automatically sum invoice line items, reducing the risk of human error. Microsoft Word also has invoice templates, but I wouldn’t recommend using them because Word templates can’t do any arithmetic for you.
If your accounting software doesn’t have an invoicing feature, you can easily create professional bills through Excel. Then start entering your budgeted numbers and voila! You have a budget.Īs your business’s finances get more involved, you can create granular sub-budgets that roll up into your business’s master budget. Clear out the numbers and add columns for each month of the period for which you’re budgeting. Start your business budget by exporting an income statement from your accounting software to Excel. BudgetingĪlthough many accounting software platforms have budgeting features, I’d choose Excel every time. Here’s how I’ve used Excel as an accountant.
How to use Excel for your small business accounting needsĮxcel can help you with countless aspects of your small business accounting. That would take hours by hand, but it’s only moments with PivotTables. You could use a PivotTable to separate your transactions by month to better understand your company’s cash flow. The example shows just a month’s worth of transactions, but imagine your spreadsheet lists of transactions for an entire year. PivotTables organizes data more logically. Rather than adding up a list of the applicable expenses using a calculator, you can use the “SUMIF” formula, instructing it only to add expenses marked as inventory purchases. Say you’re looking at the bank statement below and want to know how much the business spent on inventory purchases. FormulasĮxcel formulas significantly speed up business expense tracking and analysis. Templates are plug-and-play with pre-filled formulas. Designing your own accounting templates requires 100% precision if one cell isn’t working correctly, you might wind up with errors in your accounting records. Templates are handy for those who aren’t comfortable navigating Excel or haven’t yet aced Accounting 101.
Rather than having to design your own invoices and expense reports from scratch, you can download and tweak someone else’s creation. Microsoft has thousands of free Excel templates on its website. I could go on for eons about the Excel features that small businesses can leverage for accounting.
When you need to share financial data with a lender or investor, you’ll want to send them either a PDF or Excel file.ģ most useful features for Excel small business accounting Easy sharingĮxcel is the universal currency of accounting. For-profit companies might prepare similar reports when pitching investors. Nonprofit annual reports often use visual aids to communicate where they spend their money.
If you’re a visual learner, use Excel to create pie charts that show where your business’s money is going. Visual financial analysisįinancial analysis doesn’t have to be a list of accounting ratios that assess your company’s profitability. As we’ll explore below, Excel remains one of the best ways to import large transaction datasets into your accounting software. You don’t need to know how to set up macros to benefit from Excel’s functionality. Business owners can create macros to automate tasks, such as formatting, filtering, and running basic analysis. I’m not taking anything away from the ease of use that’s become standard in small business accounting software, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a program better suited to mass data entry than Excel.Įxcel power users know that macros can churn out hours of a human’s work in moments. While accounting software has its place in every business, you can benefit from introducing Excel into your life.Įxcel is a powerful tool that can help anyone working with numbers.
Many small businesses swear by Excel for all of their bookkeeping needs. Accountants are known for wearing pocket protectors and spending their days working in Microsoft Excel.