How Small Business Owners Can Use Excel for Accounting
For many years, Excel has helped business owners manage their accounting, especially those smaller businesses which don’t have complicated business processes. It seems the world has grown far more complicated in recent years, however, and you might be wondering whether or not Excel can still fill the bill when it comes to handling your business accounting. The answer is a qualified ‘Yes’, and in some cases, the software is as useful as ever, provided that it’s used in the way it was intended to be used.
Excel Usage Today
While there are certainly other packages being used by small business owners, Excel is still utilized by almost 60% of all businesses, which is a staggering percentage when you think about what’s available on the market. As impressive as that it is, it still represents a decline over previous numbers, primarily due to the fact that the price of ERP solutions and cloud-based accounting tools has decreased dramatically.
Best Uses for Excel Today
Despite the fact that more powerful accounting software is available today, and at affordable pricing, Excel can still be used to advantage by many small business owners. One of the features which is most useful is pivot tables, which allow a user to summarize complex sets of data which are included in a range of cells selected by the user. This can be very useful when you need to summarize data and sort it into specific categories.
Another handy feature in Excel is the potential for doing what-if analysis. This feature allows you to swap out datasets in a given formula, without altering the primary dataset used in that formula. Forecast sheets can provide the same kind of value by helping you to make forecasts which are based on your historical data. The end result of this is a graphical representation of your forecast which is easy to evaluate, and helpful toward making business decisions.
Does Your Business Accounting Turn Up Constant Shortfalls?
Running a business in the red can be a nightmare for a business owner, but there are alternatives that can help you rise above that. Contact us at Advanced Commercial Capital so we can discuss some options which might get you back in the black.
