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Five things I learned from auditing
Like many finance professionals, I began my career in audit. Here are five things that I learned from auditing and still use many years later. How to understand an organisation’s finances, quickly I...
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Managing stress at work – what can employers do?
Managing stress at work is the responsibility of employers, and yet most search results on this topic focus on what employees should be doing to manage their own stress. However, a couple of years ago...
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Why is month end such a hassle?
Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash “Well, you know, it is month end”, I say, and colleagues nod sympathetically and steer clear for a while. For most non-finance types, it’s a mysterious process...
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Carbon accounting – what gets measured gets done
Photo by Karsten Würth on Unsplash I hadn’t done much with carbon accounting in my professional life before 2020. It’s only mandatory for the largest companies and organisations so hasn’t been a...
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Yes, Xero is a good accounting system for charities
Even small charities can have big complexities when it comes to choosing and using accounting systems. There are two issues in particular which can be hard for charities to deal with on many...
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Multiple forecasts with Power Query
I recently set up a management accounts model using Power Query to combine multiple forecasts. This is for a startup charity, where we need the ability to forecast at a high level over a five year...
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Excel design tips for non-designers
I have the visual sense of a blind goat, but over the years I have picked up a number of Excel design tips which I apply to any spreadsheet that someone else has to look at. This post sets out ten...
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5 ways to wellbeing – the happy finance team edition
This week is Mental Health Awareness week so today’s blog post is a short plug for one of my favourite frameworks for thinking about mental wellbeing. (See here for another one.) The 5 Ways to...
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Why aren’t you using Excel Tables?
Cells A2 – F8 show an Excel Table. The data in rows 10-12 is in a tabular format but is not a Table. Excel Tables (capital T) have been part of Excel since the 2007 edition. Given it is now well into...
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How English language teaching helped me become an Excel trainer
Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash Before I was an Excel trainer, even before I was an accountant, I taught English as a foreign language. Even though the subject matter is quite different, I learned...
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Power Query for accountants – enhance your trial balance
Power Query has been out for over a decade and yet the majority of accountants I meet still seem unaware of what it can do for them. A possible issue is that it is usually presented in the context of...
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Creating dashboards in Excel – key skills
I attended an excellent livestream last week about Excel dashboards, presented by the legendary Chandoo. In his tutorial, he built a KPI dashboard in Excel in around an hour. As well as learning lots...
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Accounting for a property purchase in Xero – partly paid by direct grant to...
Sometimes accounting is like a jigsaw puzzle… I had a fun challenge recently – accounting for a property purchase in Xero where a third party had paid grant funding directly to the vendor. As it took...
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The most useful power query functions for accountants
Here are the five most useful power query functions for accountants, in my personal opinion: ExtractConditional ColumnsMerge QueriesData from FolderUnpivot It is, of course, impossible to pick just...
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The five most useful new Excel functions for finance teams
Table showing new Excel function FILTER This post sets out the five most useful new Excel functions for finance teams, based on my experience. By “new” I mean available in 2019 or later versions of...
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Tracking resolutions throughout the year (with Excel, obviously)
Target tracker in Excel There’s no particular reason why you should listen to my views on how to keep to New Year’s resolutions. This quick blogpost is just to share a few thoughts. Excel is involved,...
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Five things I learned at the Global Excel Summit 2022
How to change the layout of your pivot table – one of many things I learned at the Global Excel Summit Last week I “went” to the Global Excel Summit. This is a three day event featuring many of the...
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VAT partial exemption on Xero
Here are some practical tips for accounting for VAT partial exemption on Xero. What is partial exemption? A basic principle of VAT is that you can only reclaim VAT that relates to “taxable supplies”....
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Why purchase order systems suck
Photo by rupixen.com on Unsplash Purchase order systems suck for most users within the average organisation and also their suppliers. I was prompted to write this blog by this post on LinkedIn, by...
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Processing timesheets with Power Query – what about the human factor?
Timesheet in excel On the face of it, processing timesheets with Power Query ought to be fairly straightforward. By “processing timesheets” I am primarily thinking about records of hours worked that...
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