In any role of accounting, you will get the advantages of using spreadsheets by incorporating them into your daily tasks. It makes your job streamlined and very easy to manage. Have a look at some of the essential features of spreadsheets and how it supports accounting tasks.
Easy tracking of payments: Most small business owners and those people who are entirely new to accounting will find it very difficult to track expenses. A spreadsheet offers the best solution. Spreadsheets are mainly used for analyzing money that has already been spent and income that has been received. They facilitate splitting of money that you have already paid and obtain by tome period and source. For instance, you can quickly segregate various kinds of expenses like rent, insurance and track exactly how much has been spent on all those each month. All these by using a simple table in a spreadsheet.
By linking related data: Another potential benefit of utilizing a spreadsheet is that you can easily connect the worksheets. This is very useful for things like cash flow, where you are required to link the natural balance in your bank at the end of the last month to the opening balance for the current month. For carrying out this, all you have to do is select + in the cell from where you want the link and put the cursor in that cell you wish to link to. This functions well for budgets, especially if you have finished a budget plan for production in one sheet and connect it to another master budget. So, when the production budget alters, it will accordingly update the master budget also.
Relevant formatting: While dealing with lots of financial data, you will wish to make it easy for navigation.
Interestingly most of the spreadsheet software provides you with various tools to assist you in making your spreadsheet visually attractive and easy to understand. You can also color code the cells and sort your data by using colors.
Spreadsheets are available free:For maximum business, all features of spreadsheets are available for free. Whether your organization uses Microsoft Office and can quickly get access to excel or runs on G suite where you get Google sheets, all people will get access to the spreadsheet provided you have an internet connection.
They need minimum training:Whether you have utilized a spreadsheet for managing the personal finances or you have spent some of the countless hours constructing pivot tables for the previous roles, chances are there that you have had some of the hands-on experience utilizing spreadsheets. Besides building complex formulas, a record of information in the spreadsheets is quite intuitive and does not need any intensive training for getting hanged to it. This makes spreadsheet one of the best accessible options for all teams who are scaling up very fast and lack time for training new employees.
Spreadsheet function: Some of the use of functionality like IF statements are highly relevant in accounting. For example, you want to analyze the money you have spent on monthly wages. You can use the IF statement to indicate whether or not a member of the staff team has been given money over time. This statement can also be used for calculations.
Then there is the Sum up function, an effortless and quick function that saves an awful lot of duration. Instead of adding a large amount of data to your calculator, you can easily reach the total by choosing the sum function and then high lightening all the included things.
Lookup function: One of the tools increases the importance of spreadsheets and is more often used by accountants. This tool is Lookup functions. This function helps search for relevant information in association with specific information and is used extremely in the stick control environment.
For instance, if you wish to know if a specific part is in stock or not, you can utilize the Look Up function to figure out several items associated with the item number. This makes the whole process of searching very useful.
So, this was all about how spreadsheets help basic accounting needs like bookkeeping, invoice management, etc.
Spreadsheets remain one of the most popular accounting tools that finance managers use. Especially for a small business, it is extremely useful, as they can easily focus on some of the essential accounting tasks like budgeting and forecasting. In simple words, spreadsheets are considered an accountant's best friend when the matter is about managing basic accounting tasks. Based on your accounting and financing needs, spreadsheets can assist you with the most basic functions.