Why Excel Is Important For Accounting Professionals ?

Microsoft Office Excel was designed to support accounting functions such as budgeting, preparing financial statements, and creating balance sheets. It comes with basic spreadsheet functionality and many functions for performing complex mathematical calculations. It also supports many add-ons for activities such as modeling and financial forecasting, and seamlessly integrates with external data to allow you to import and export banking information and financial data to and from other accounting software platforms. It helps accountants in : 

Budgeting and Statements

Microsoft Office Excel ships with templates for creating budgets, cash-flow statements, and profit-and-loss statements, which are some of the most basic documents used in accounting. In addition, you can download more complex budgeting and statement templates from the Office website, or purchase specialized templates from third-party vendors and install these in the application.

Spreadsheets

Performing line calculations is a basic accounting task, and Excel spreadsheets are designed to contain data in a tabular format that supports both in-line and summation calculations, replacing the need for ticker tape and special accounting calculators. The data in the spreadsheet is reusable and storable, making Excel more flexible than an accounting calculator for performing simple calculations and summations.

External Data

You can import data from many different data sources into Excel. This is especially useful for accounting as you can pull sales data, banking data, and invoices from many sources into one central workbook to support your accounting activities. The data can be stored in different databases and file formats prior to importing, allowing you to access data from many different areas of your business without having to do additional data entry.

Integration

Excel integrates with many popular accounting software applications. For example, you can use the wizards that ship with your preferred accounting software package to map Excel spreadsheets to your accounting data so you can perform push and pull data operations from both Excel and your accounting package on demand.