As an accounting manager for any client, developing an accurate and consistent budget will need to be a top priority. If you have Microsoft Office, don’t let Excel sit idle in your hard drive. You can use Excel to develop a quick and easy budget, do calculations and create visual representations.
Accurate budgets are important tools for financial analysis.
Having a realistic picture of finances is vital for predicting a company’s financial situations. Are savings dwindling? Is there a pending debt spiral? Financial assessments are tricky to conduct when a proper budget recording procedure has not been the standard. Using Excel tools can assist you to develop a sensible budget for your clients, in fact accountingweb.com says, “for the management accountant, Excel pivot tables represent the most important development in IT since the original invention of the spreadsheet.”
Excel pivot tables are easy to use and have no data limit.
Pivot table is the tool used in Excel to develop budgets. This is an easy tool to learn and it will not take long for you to generate the reports you need. The latest version of Excel has no limit on how many records you can maintain. As long as you load the data into an access database first, your only limit will be the memory allowed by your computer.
Take advantage of Excel budget templates.
To make effective budgeting as easy as possible you can utilize the templates offered by Excel. These templates will have tables for data input, as well as graphs for interpreting data. This will be useful in producing visuals for your clients as you discuss the outlook of their budget.
Empower others to record and submit their own budgets.
Once you become an expert in building your budgets in Excel, you can teach your clients to use this method in developing and recording their own budgets. Department or account managers can use this method to submit budgets to you for analysis of the big picture budget without having to keep tabs on the smaller budgeting decisions.
Budgets can be difficult to produce and keep up to date as many expenses can change monthly or be hard to predict. The good thing about using Excel for your budgeting is the easy manipulation of data input you can change monthly based on your client’s individual needs. Having automated calculation fields and graph generations will make budget analysis as easy as entering the numbers into the correct fields.
To learn more first steps and discover the basics of excel budgeting sign up for our Excel Budgeting Ideas webinar today.