You don’t necessarily need fancy accounting software for your business. See how Excel can still provide everything required for small business accounts.
Who Should Use Excel for Business Accounts?
In some senses, accounting software is nothing more than spreadsheets in an attractive interface, organizing and inputting data to calculate results. You might prefer Excel to other programs in the following circumstances:
- You’re comfortable working with spreadsheets. No matter how user-friendly an app or software is, there are limits to customization. You don’t have to create spreadsheets out of whole cloth. Microsoft offers many free templates with a Microsoft 365 subscription. A quick web search provides other templates to work with.
- You prefer to use the Microsoft suite of products. Microsoft Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, OneNote and Teams are mainstay business productivity apps. Rest assured that Microsoft optimized Excel to cooperate with its other apps for sharing and designing professional presentations.
- You don’t need the extra bells and whistles other apps offer. Excel can serve you very well if you don’t have multiple teams and departments, tons of inventory and significant cash flow to track.
What About Free Spreadsheet Software?
Compared to free spreadsheet software, Excel delivers a complete set of features that is hard to match. Google Sheets is great for cloud storage and sharing with your team but doesn’t have all of Excel’s computing and customization capabilities. LibreOffice has similar calculating features but lacks all of Excel’s functionality and seamless integration with the Microsoft suite of products. While you can get free community support, there is no technical support. If you’re not a techie, LibreOffice might not be the best software to rely on for your business.
Free alternatives would be useful only for a business that needs the bare minimum of bookkeeping software and has a strict budget. With its host of features, Excel remains one of the most popular tools for managing business accounts.
How Can Excel Be Used for Business Accounts?
Repetitive entries can be automated with macros that instantly export data from other files. Create customized reports from Excel for attractive and easy-to-understand reviews of your data. Pivot tables help pull out data from specific cells and summarize the results.
Excel also allows easy dataset comparison. For instance, you can track customer activity to determine who generates the most revenue. Monitor cash flow by tabulating recurring costs and comparing receivables against accounts payable.
With a wide variety of choices for your business’s accounting needs, Microsoft Excel can still be an excellent tool for the job.