The global economy is built on two things: the internal combustion engine and Microsoft Excel. Never forget this. Kevin Hector
Excel is a fantastic accounting tool for anyone who is self-employed or who runs an SME (small and medium-sized enterprise/business) which has basic accounting requirements. This is because it is simple to use, and offers templates that can be easily adapted to suit your unique needs.
It’s incredibly useful for planning tasks, managing data, and calculating finances.
Excel accounting templates are a great way to manage your accounts. The programme has an entire library of accounting templates which allow you to simply manage your finances, whether these are personal or business-related.
Here are our favourite Microsoft Excel templates to help you with your accounting tasks.
Small Business Cash Flow Forecast
This is a great Excel template that's free to use and great for small business owners and sole traders using the software for their bookkeeping. This is a simple and accessible cash flow forecast template that can be used to track and predict how much money your business will have and whether or not it'll have enough to meet its financial obligations.
In this template, you can set your expenses and create a chart of your monthly balances, which will help you to better understand your finances and create sales targets to ensure your company is healthy. Of course, this is just our favourite and you can always search for other cash flow templates for small businesses on the Microsoft site or other Excel template libraries. Find out more about using Excel for accounting
Balance Sheet
Accounting is the bridge between financial chaos and structured prosperity. Amanda Green
This balance sheet template allows you to compare your financial balance across several years. It can be used to show increases and decreases in net worth, assets, liabilities, etc.
Remember that there's no reason you can't customise any template that you're using.
After all, Excel templates are essentially just spreadsheets where somebody else has already done a lot of the work for you. Once you've gotten on top of your bookkeeping and are comfortable with using Excel, you can make this template (and any other) more powerful by changing certain aspects of it to make it more applicable to you and your business.
Balance sheets are particularly useful as they can give you a better picture of what's going on with your business to make better decisions. Learn about the advantages of using Excel for accounting.
Business Expense Budget
This business expense budget template allows users to compare their monthly expenses against their planned business expenses. After all, controlling every expense is an important part of making a profit.
With this free and simple template, you can create charts and graphs to keep track of your monthly variances, calculate line items, and plan and make business decisions. This particular template is used to keep track of expenses over a year and is divided into months.
If you need something that for across several years, you can always search for other free templates and download them from the Microsoft website and Excel template websites. Similarly, you can always duplicate the sheet for different years, but this won't automatically allow you to compare each year unless you modify it. Fortunately, this template is quite easy to modify. Discover Excel's best features and functions.
General Ledger with Budget Comparison
Learning accounting is not just acquiring knowledge; it’s cultivating the art of financial mastery. Samantha Wilson
This is an accounting template that can help you keep a much closer eye on your financial accounts and expenses. Use this template to record your monthly expenses and set up your expense account, including charitable and sponsorship expenses.
This template also includes a summary worksheet and a year-to-date comparison against your budget estimates. This is one of the more detailed sheets in our list, so it mightn't be ideal for Excel novices. However, once you've got the hang of your accounts and how to create and manage spreadsheets, you should probably download this one. Learn how to start accounting with Excel.
The Advantages of Using Excel Templates
Though you may sometimes feel like you're in uncharted waters, you're not the first small business owner or sole trader to have to manage their accounts or do all the bookkeeping. It's very likely that somebody else has already come across every problem you encounter and already have found a solution in Excel to fix it or better manage their accounts.
Unless you have a very specific accounting need that's unique to you, there's probably an accounting template out there you can use or adapt. The latter is very important because while there are some simple templates you can use, you'll always want to ensure that they're fully adapted to your needs when using them. This is also very true when it comes to downloading Excel templates from other countries. There are certain records you have to keep and transactions you'll need to record as per South African law and not every template you download will include these. Otherwise, templates can save you a lot of time and effort as much of the work has already been done and all you'll need to do is tweak a few things and put your information into the spreadsheet.
Do you know Superprof is a good site to find online bookkeeping course?
Where Can You Download Excel Templates?
Have you worked out what you need but can’t find any useful templates?
Here are some additional online resources where you can find plenty of different Excel templates. They exist to make your life much easier. From accounting to business analysis, you can use Excel for almost anything.
- Microsoft Office Templates
- Vertex42
- Smartsheet
- TrumpEXCEL
- Spreadsheet123
- MyExcelOnline
- The Spreadsheet Page.
All you have to do is download the templates and you can start filling in the cells and Excel will do the rest. There are templates for everyone from large businesses to sole traders. There are a lot of Excel templates that conform to professional accounting standards, too. Use them for your accounting and ensure that your business accounts look professional. Remember that these aren't the only places online to download Excel templates and you can always just search directly for a specific template in Google and find a good number of results.
Pros and Cons of Using Excel Templates
While using Excel templates for your accounting has numerous benefits, there are a few disadvantages that you should be aware.
Here's what you need to know in order to make an informed decision:
- Because Excel is a manual tool, it is easy for you to make errors. Sometimes these errors are harder to notice than when using automated bookkeeping software.
- Excel does not allow you to automatically categorise transactions or automatically import data from your bank accounts.
- If you work with large volumes of data, it can be time-consuming to manually enter this data into Excel and categorise transactions.
- It is difficult to use the double-entry bookkeeping system in Excel. The double-entry system is preferred over the single-entry system as it makes it easier to detect errors.
- It could actually be time-consuming to use templates if you need to adapt them significantly to suit your requirements.
- If you are new to Excel, you will need to dedicate time to learning the program and navigating its bookkeeping templates.
Boost Your Excel Skills
If you're interested in learning more about Excel, accounting, or finance, consider getting in touch with some of the talented and experienced private tutors on the Superprof website.
There are plenty of private tutors all over the country and around the world offering tutoring either face-to-face, online, or in groups.
Since each type of tutoring comes with its advantages and disadvantages in terms of learning approach and cost, think carefully about which will be best for you and your goals. Face-to-face tutoring allows the tutor to focus fully on their student and also allows them to tailor their lessons to the student. Of course, this bespoke service comes at a cost and one-on-one tutoring tends to be more expensive than the other types available. However, it's usually the most cost-effective since the tutor will spend every minute of every session working with their student.
Group tutorials are great for those on a budget as you can share the cost of the tutoring with the other students in attendance. While group tutoring isn't as tailored as one-on-one tutoring, it can be useful for those who learn well from their peers or prefer a more social atmosphere while they learn. If you can't find any suitable or available tutors in your local area, you can always broaden your search to include online tutors. As long as you have a webcam and a decent internet connection, you can learn almost anything from private tutors all over the world. With academic subjects like economics and finance or computer-based subjects like IT and using Excel, online tutorials can be just as effective as face-to-face tutoring.
Don't forget that a lot of the tutors on Superprof also offer the first lesson or session for free. You can use these sessions to try out various tutors before deciding on the one that's right for you. Of course, rather than just contacting every single tutor and arranging a free lesson, we recommend thinking about what you're looking for in a tutor, such as grade 12 accounting lessons, and only contacting those that meet your criteria. After all, you might be working with your tutor for a while so you must make the right choice when you pick them. They should specialize in exactly what you want to learn and be within your budget. If you're not sure, remember that you can always check their qualifications and read reviews left by their other students on their profiles before you reach out to them to discuss tutoring. Excel is a powerful tool and with the right tutor, you too can learn how to get the most out of it for your accounting.
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