Every business has a seemingly endless amount of data to manage. When you combine financial, customer, administrative, and all the other information your business needs access to on a regular basis, it can be difficult to find what you need when you need it. You probably already use Microsoft Excel in order to manage some areas of your business. However, many business owners and managers fail to maximize the use of Excel and realize how it can make life a lot easier for both you and your employees.
Below are some of the benefits of Excel training and how it can transform your business. By learning how to use Excel beyond the basics, you’ll be able to save yourself quite a bit of time, money and headache.
Keeps You More Organized
If you’re like many small businesses, you’ve gotten accustomed to keeping information in a few different places. This could be your accounting software, CRM, hard drive folders or other places on your computer. You may also deal with paper forms that are stashed away somewhere in the office. Utilizing Excel to track information gives you a single place to store and reference all of your data, no matter what it’s function. Using Excel will help you remain organized, and give you access to the right information easily when you need it.
Keeps You Aware of Key Information
Using Excel goes beyond just having everything in one place. By having all of your information in one place, you’ll be aware of certain key information, and data, that’s essential to your business running smoothly. You’ll be able to spot trends over time, for example, that indicate when/if you need to take action or make changes in your processes. If the cost of a certain item or expense is increasing over time, you’ll be able to spot that trend and look into why it’s happening. On a higher level, it will become clear if your business is actually spending more than you’re making, which is harder to do if all of your financial data is littered across multiple systems. Excel tracking will also help to highlight errors, incorrect calculations, or inaccurate figures that you need to be aware of.
Simplifies Calculations and Complex Figures
One of the great things about Excel is that you can perform complex calculations simply by setting up formulas and the plugging in numbers. All it takes is some basic training in terms of knowing the symbols and language it takes to express formulas. Once you’re thoroughly trained with the software, you’ll be able to set up multiple spreadsheets and manage complex calculations with ease. The SUM function and text formulas are just a couple of the tools that are effective in managing calculations on a large scale.
Improves Productivity by Performing Routine Tasks
Using Excel to handle some of the more mundane tasks of your business will improve productivity all around, from you as a business owner down to your employees. You can make information always available when needed by everyone, instead of your employees having to constantly manage complex calculations on their own. This will free them up to focus on the most important aspects of whatever their job may be, instead of having to sift through the data they need.
Improves Your Ability to Communicate Visually
One of the other functions that businesses use Excel for is to help make sense of their data by presenting it visually. You can use both tables and graphs to take the figures in your spreadsheets in order to better understand different aspects of your business. Knowing how to use table, graph, and recommended chart functions can go a long way towards helping employees and managers communicate necessary information efficiently, without people having to manually comb through the data. You can even create three-dimensional charts and and visually appealing worksheets.
These are just some of the ways that Excel training can benefit your business on multiple levels. Once you learn the basics and start experiencing some success, you’ll wonder how you ever ran your business without Excel.
