Thursday 22 October 2015

Five Excel Tips and Tricks for Basic Bookkeeping

Five Excel Tips and Tricks for Basic Bookkeeping

thumbnail-spreadsheetsStarting your own business can be an extremely exciting and empowering experience but comes with its own set of responsibilities. One of the most crucial of these is the need to stay on top of your incomings and outgoings.

For many, even the most basic bookkeeping and budgeting will be an alien experience. A recent Sunlife poll, found that only a third of UK adults formally budget, with just 19% using a spreadsheet and a further 7% using an online tool or app.

Whether you’re a small business owner or just trying to get on top of your family financing, tracking your incomings, outgoings and tax liabilities has a host of benefits, such as allowing you to project your profit, loss and turnover into the future and budget accordingly. The accounting tool that most turn to for this task is Microsoft’s spreadsheet stalwart, Excel*.

Excel’s strength is its incredible versatility. When it comes to bookkeeping and budgeting, it is by far the best option on the table. To some though getting to grips with Excel’s interface can feel a little daunting. It’s true that the program comes with a lot of features, but it’s unlikely you will ever need to use more than a small fraction of them.

So without further ado, let’s take a look at five essential Excel tips and tricks that any budding SME owner really needs to get under their belts. (For the purposes of this guide, I’m going to presume a very basic working knowledge of Excel, such as summing columns, navigating around a spreadsheet, etc).

Paste Special

To explain why the paste special functionality is so crucial to Excel, take a look at the two images below... Read more here