K2's Excel Essentials for Staff Accountants

Overview

Staff accountants have specific needs when working with Excel. Unfortunately, their existing Excel knowledge often does not meet these needs. Chief among these are summarizing data quickly and accurately, generating accurate and aesthetically pleasing reports, and creating accounting-centric calculations for elements such as depreciation, amortization, and interest. By participating in this eight-hour session, staff accountants will gain the essential skills to maximize efficiency and accuracy when working with Excel.

This session begins with a quick overview of Excel best practices. It then progresses rapidly into discussions that address PivotTables, sophisticated formulas, Tables, formatting, and working with dates in Excel. Throughout the session, you will learn from accounting-centric examples to reinforce key learning points. In this session, you will learn in a “laptop-friendly” environment, and participants will have access to all the demonstration files. In sum, this seminar is a “must” for all staff accountants seeking to improve their efficiency and accuracy when working with Excel.

Highlights

Best practices for creating and working with Excel workbooks

Effectively using Excel functions when creating formulas

The importance of PivotTables in modern reporting environments

Best practices for formatting your workbooks

Prerequisites

Fundamental knowledge of Microsoft Office Excel 2019 or newer

Designed For

Accounting and financial professionals who want to use the power of Excel in common business situations to summarize and analyze data

Objectives

List five critical best practices associated with creating workbooks and constructing workbooks that comply with these principles

Utilize PivotTables and PivotCharts to quickly summarize and present data without generating formulas

Build sophisticated formulas to assist with reporting and analysis, including those that use functions such as VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, SUMIFS, CHOOSE, XNPV, XIRR, PMT, IPMT, ACCRINT, and TRIM

Create Tables from ranges of Excel data and identify the primary advantages of working with Tables

Apply formats quickly and efficiently to Excel reports and understand the importance of features such as the Accounting format, Accounting Underlines, Precision as Displayed, Center Across Selection, and Flash Fill

Work with date-oriented data in Excel and create calculations - such as those involving depreciation expense and interest accruals - involving the passage of time

Preparation

None

Credits

Level

Code

Vendor

Fields of Study

Leader(s):

Mac McClelland, Mac McClelland, an attorney and accou, K2 Enterprises

Leader Bios

Mac McClelland, Mac McClelland, an attorney and accou, K2 Enterprises

Mac McClelland, MBA, JD, an attorney and accounting professional, is an associate of K2 Enterprises of Hammond, La., and Network Management Group of Hutchinson, Kan. Mac was formerly the director of the Centre for Financial Studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, where he lived and worked for seven years from 1990 to 1997. He was also a member of the faculty of the Advanced Business Programme, ranked in the top 100 MBA programs in the world by The Economist, specializing in business strategy and strategic management accounting. He gained his practical experience in information systems with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and has an established practice in business and technology consulting. Mac has taught hundreds of continuing professional education seminars to accountants and business managers in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Japan and Southeast Asia. His presentations are highly rated, and he has won several awards for teaching excellence. MCClelland has been published in leading business and practitioner journals, including Computers in Accounting, Journal of Accounting Education, and the top rated Journal of Accounting Research.

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