Screenshot of Excel template for calculating Employer’s National Insurance before and after the changes
I posted on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago about creating an Excel template to calculate budget impact of the changes to Employer’s National Insurance.
In this post I’ll share a few observations, both about the calculations and also the act of creating the template.
How do you learn more Power Query? This is a post addressed to people who have already learned initial navigation and have played around with a few of the buttons. Perhaps you attended one of my Introduction to Power Query courses.
Finance teams almost always lead digital transformation projects, but should they?
This thought came to me while I was enduring a financial systems sales pitch that I’d accidentally ended up in. (I’m normally good at avoiding these now, I must have had my guard down).
As they droned on about how we could finally be free of spreadsheets, I started to think; what if we (finance) are the problem here?
I’m a late adopter of Cell Styles in Excel. Before I started doing financial modelling and consulting work for other people, I didn’t really appreciate how useful they were.
I wish I’d learned them a lot earlier as they would have been helpful in earlier roles, too.
Image shows example of flags in financial modelling.
I was going to write a detailed guide about using flags in financial modelling. However, there’s already a really good one here, as part of the ICAEW’s financial modelling good practice guide(s).
So instead I’ll just write something more simple to explain why you might want to use flags in financial modelling. And add a specific point about dynamic arrays, which are a newish development in Excel.
Here are five tips for using Googlesheets if you normally use Excel.
1. Check your document is actually a Google Sheet
If you’ve imported it from Excel, it might still be an Excel file that’s being read by Google in compatibility mode. You can tell because name and file type of the workbook will end in XLSX.
This is the worst of both worlds, as you are getting neither Excel nor Google functionality. Save the file as a Google sheet (in the file menu)