Help and ideas for busy numbers people
At a recent webinar, the presenter led by suggesting that in these tough economic times there is more of a need for live financial data. (They may have been selling a product).
I think it’s much more about the decisions that you need to take from the financial data.
Continue reading “The need for live financial data (or not)”
I’ve spent quite a lot of time in my professional career thinking about why companies don’t pay invoices on time. As a finance director and as a freelancer, I have experience of both sides of the fence.
I’ve written this post to help freelancers understand the blocks that they might face and how to overcome them.
Continue reading “Why companies don’t pay invoices on time”
I recently designed and delivered some Excel training for auditors. Specifically, it was Excel training for audit trainees who had just started at the firm.
I benefitted enormously at the start of my career when my employer arranged for all new audit trainees to have Excel training as part of our induction. Even though it was pretty basic, it established a good grounding in things like formula construction, absolute and relative cell references, and a few shortcuts.
Continue reading “Excel training for auditors”
Last month I fulfilled a long-held ambition by cycling from Bristol to London using (mostly) the Great Western Way. As I couldn’t find many first hand posts about other people doing this, I thought I’d write one.
Warning: This post has no Excel or finance content whatsoever.
Continue reading “Cycling the Great Western Way from Bristol to London”This blog post probably won’t make a lot of sense unless you read Part 1 first.
Having customised our VAT report in Xero in part 1, we’re now going to use Power Query to turn this into a journal.
Continue reading “Monthly irrecoverable VAT adjustments with Xero and Power Query: Part 2”I asked on LinkedIn the other day whether people would be interested in my method for posting monthly irrecoverable VAT adjustments and was pleasantly surprised by the responses.
So here goes.
Continue reading “Monthly irrecoverable VAT adjustments with Xero and Power Query: Part 1.”
I don’t offer a standard Intermediate Excel course (or indeed, a standard Beginners course or a standard Advanced course).
There are a couple of reasons for this.
Firstly, I tailor all Excel training that I deliver to the needs of the course participants.
Continue reading “Why I don’t have a standard Intermediate Excel course”
As well as Excel training, I do part time interim finance cover.
Continue reading “Look, no handover! Emergency interim finance work”I’m adding a quick post about accounting for retentions payable in Xero because I couldn’t find an article explaining it.
Continue reading “Accounting for retentions payable in Xero”If your pivot table defaults to Count instead of Sum, then you have inconsistent numerical data.
I found this out on a webinar about five years ago, and it still seems to be a mostly unknown feature.
And yes, I call it a feature, not a bug, because it is ultimately helping you.
What it is doing is giving you an immediate message that your numerical data has gaps, or perhaps has numbers formatted as text, or other errors. If you ignore this, you might produce inaccurate analysis.
So – if your pivot table defaults to Count, don’t do what I used to do, which was to tut and manually change it to Sum.
Investigate your data carefully until you’ve found the inconsistencies and then try it again until it defaults to Sum. Here’s a link to some suggestions for converting text to numbers.
I love training finance teams in Excel and Power Query – have a look here at what I can do for you.