Kessler Associates blog: Excel takes the strain

A great many businesses use Excel for creating their spreadsheets. It's a highly useful tool for calculating long trains of figures and providing you with detailed totals at the end.

However, there's a lot more to it than that. Given a properly laid-out workbook, small businesses and sole traders can run their entire accounts in Excel (as long as their annual income doesn't exceed the new HMRC levels for using their recommended accountancy software), construction firms can run highly detailed materials projections, and a vast array of facts and figures can be stored in such a way that makes the data easy to read and ready to be output to a printer or as a PDF.

Add to that some intelligent styling and layout direction, and you'll have an Excel workbook which really can do the job it's supposed to do, instead of losing your figures in something which has been hastily set-up and poorly planned.

An example of good Excel spreadsheet design which highlights totals and provides notes for how individual figures should be entered

Complex formulae can handle figures based on their condition so that, for instance, if Circumstance A is met (such as a cost being raised on a Tuesday) then a figure is added to Total X, whereas if Circumstance B is met (such as a cost being raised on a Thursday) then a figure is added to Total Y.

VAT figures can be deducted from totals, or added to them, and the VAT rate can easily be amended from one location. Programming functions can be added to your workbook to automate complex functions, insert new rows in a table, sort data, print it, and produce a series of reports based on it.

Summary sheets can handle your data entries in various ways, giving you a multilayered set of figures to work with for your projections or project calculations. The possibilities are endless, so let us know what you need and we can show you how to do it.

More information can be found on the Excel spreadsheets page.

Whatever you need, we have the solution.

Return to the blog index here.