Top tips: Using Excel more effectively

Microsoft Excel – the Coca-Cola of accounting – is a fixed element in the lives of many accountants. In recognition of this fact, Aqilla have taken a look at ten ways you could utilise this vital tool more effectively, three of which are featured here.

Don’t do everything in Excel

The shortcomings of many accounting systems make it easy to gravitate toward the familiar Microsoft Excel icon, no exporting data and hand-cranking the analysis required. But this is very often not in the best interests of a business.

Spreadsheets are, by their very nature, highly personal and expecting an enterprise to rely on their contents and accuracy can be a leap of faith.

Excel documents often lack context and narrative. There’s no error checking, no validation, and no stress testing of the numbers contained therein – and there are often no double entry test cases applied and quite often they are simply wrong.

Use Excel for what it is good for

What Excel is excellent at is on-the-fly analysis, calculation, professional presentation and visualisation.

Data exported into Excel from your accounts system at the click of a button can in most cases be referenced for the production of graphs, tables, reports and further analysis combined with data derived from other sources.

Be secure

As a bare minimum, any connection between a spreadsheet application and the core finance system should utilise an encrypted ‘https’ connection.

Along with providing discrete access for each registered company, all systems should as a minimum control user access by way of a unique username and password.

Perhaps the biggest risk is unhappy or unprofessional employees exposing or losing critical data, something that could happen whether you happen to be using a cloud based application – or not. Controlling the number of people who can and do access any off-line analysis, spreadsheet or computer data combined with an effective security policy and managed workflow can help mitigate the risk.