Its Windows ’98 looking interface can easily make even the oldest of Millennials cringe in their non-swiveling home-office chairs. But to us, the power of Microsoft Excel remains undisputed.
Sure, a never-ending series of softwares has been cropping up with promises of being THE tool to organize your finances and analyze your business, but no one does it quite like Excel.
As a business consultancy helping clients achieve financial transparency from a business perspective, we at Nea-Kosma actually stan Excel.
As a dynamic powerhouse which helps dive deeper into numerics in ways that may seem awfully complicated at first, Excel is actually a great software to work with data.
But its value exceeds its role as a mere data sorting tool. For us, it also serves as a foundational base for understanding business trends, customer behavior, sales and the financial evolution of a company.
Here are 5 ways you can actually use Excel to excel (sorry we just had to):
1. Track business growth
One of the most pertinent questions for a business or a freelancer is simply — How is my business doing?
While it may seem like a simple question concerning income and costs, analyzing financial progress (and the reasons behind it) might require a little more digging (or mapping in this case).
Analyzing transactions is a key way to decrypt how a business has been evolving, where the loopholes lie and zoom in on the cracks. This is where Excel displays its maximum strength.
Excel helps filter and categorize transactions by relevance to suit each business’ unique income and cost structure, providing clear, visual reports that serve to evaluate growth and trends.
This provides concrete answers to important questions such as how much money your business has made over the last quarter/month, what your monthly costs are, who your top customers are and sometimes how much longer your business can survive if things don’t change.
For Example -
To help our client, a music and sound artist, gain insights about their financial situation, we tracked their business growth by combining data from their current expense/revenue streams and accounting-related data approved by their tax advisor.
By analyzing these numbers we created a visual graph which shows that in February, June and October the balance between the gross business income and overall expenses was negative, whereas the gross business income was much higher than the costs in July and September.
Adding data and insights from strategic discussions with our clients, this helps understand which seasons went well and how to push the underlying factors for the upcoming years.
2. See behind the data
It might sound ironic that an ’85 born software can help get work done faster even today, but numbers don’t lie.
Once you get the hang of it, Excel has a multitude of rapid short-cuts that make it easy to keep your numerics clean and your books updated on the go.
It is also an efficient intaker of evolving information that lets you zoom in on specific factors regularly. One of the ways that Excel does this is through Pivot Tables.
Pivot Tables are an interactive process unique to Excel which helps summarize large amounts of data. They summarize and reorganize a selected data range in a spreadsheet or database table to obtain a desired view.
They also help -
- Serve as a base for PivotCharts. PivotCharts are interactive graphic charts that can be filtered, for instance by cost category or month
- To overview and oversee data (summarize over a certain time period, add subtotals + grand totals) from different data sources
- Focus on a certain data section from an overall database to answer specific questions like:
How many products have been sold in different variations or locations? (Sales)
Which cost structure an average month has? (Finance)
From which distribution channel most clients come from? (Marketing)
For Example -
Using a Pivot Table and Chart, you can easily distinguish client performance, narrowing down on a specific client to track their monthly contribution to your generated income. This can eventually help take further business decisions.
3. Organize heavy data sets
In all probability, you’re keeping your business data secure by digitizing it in some form.
Keeping track of cybernated numbers can get messy at times as there’s a lot of them flying around between invoices, payments, taxes and all those little things you’re afraid of missing.
Excel is especially a great tool for keeping things clean. Its fairly straightforward (although boring) input system makes it simple to feed in data, which can be easily stored as different versions of sheets.
And Excel can hold a significant amount of data, ideally suited to small-mid sized enterprises who don’t use their own softwares, as well as for entrepreneurs and freelancers who want to take care of their numbers independently.
N-K Tip — If the MS Excel desktop interface is too overwhelming for you, Google Sheets is a great simplified alternative to collect and reflect on data.
4. Tweak your business
Excel doesn’t just bring you this far and leave you there, it takes you till the end.
Which in number-talk means that after you get all of these charts and graphs, you can deduce really specific insights and responses to questions concerning your business.
By analyzing how much income a certain project, product or client has generated, you can make decisions on whether you should continue in the same direction or implement changes.
For Example -
Using Excel, we helped our client, a design agency, analyze how large the income share of each of their projects has been. This helped enable them to conduct further strategic measures to strengthen these service areas and their availability.
This kind of analysis can also help answer questions specific to different departments of your business such as in Marketing to analyze spends on campaigns and affiliates, or in Sales to modify or build up an effective pricing strategy.
5. Make magic calculations
MS Excel formulas may look kind of daunting at first, but once you’ve worked with a few, you’ll quickly realize how easy complicated problems and calculations can be when you have the right shortcuts.
We took it upon ourselves to list down a few must-have spells for your next Excel adventures.
Try them out!
And voilà!
The list of tasks you can make easier with Excel goes on, but we’re going to stop here and let you start with these. 🧠
