K2's Excel Essentials for Staff Accountants

Overview

Staff accountants have specific needs when working with Excel. Unfortunately, these needs are often not met by their existing Excel knowledge. 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.

This course qualifies for reimbursement through the state’s Workforce Training Express Fund. As of April 7, 2025, the state’s Workforce Training Express Fund suspended reimbursements for training costs to Massachusetts businesses. While we don’t have a confirmed timeline for the program to resume, it will likely be sometime this summer. We will continue to monitor this closely and encourage you to visit the state’s Workforce Training website for the most current updates and guidance.

This course qualifies for reimbursement through the state’s Workforce Training Express Fund. Firms/companies with fewer than 50 staff can be reimbursed up to 100% of the cost of training and firms/companies with 50-100 employees can be reimbursed up to 50% of the cost of training. You must register for the course and apply for reimbursement through the Workforce Training Express Fund website a minimum of three weeks prior to the start of the course. The course code for this program is C-3086. To learn more, click here or contact Julia Ekelund at jekelund@masscpas.org.

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

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