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)”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.”
Why is reforecasting so painful in many organisations? Why does the word “reforecast” strike such fear into some people’s lives?
I don’t mean so much the content of it – let’s face it, lots of numbers are going to be terrifying at the moment – but more the process itself.
Continue reading “Why is reforecasting so painful?”
There’s no particular reason why you should listen to my views on how to keep to New Year’s resolutions. This quick blogpost is just to share a few thoughts. Excel is involved, obviously.
Continue reading “Tracking resolutions throughout the year (with Excel, obviously)”
I attended an excellent livestream last week about Excel dashboards, presented by the legendary Chandoo. In his tutorial, he built a KPI dashboard in Excel in around an hour. As well as learning lots of useful tips, it also made me think about the key skills (Excel and otherwise) that you need to build a great dashboard.
Continue reading “Creating dashboards in Excel – key skills”
What would happen in your organisation if you stopped producing management accounts?
I’ve had to delay issuing management accounts a few of times in my professional career. (It’s funny, it feels scary even admitting that, such is the sacred status of the Month End Routine. It makes me feel like I’ve failed as a finance director.)
Continue reading “Who would miss your management accounts?”
When I had more junior finance roles in larger organisations, I often found the annual budgeting process to be somewhere between traumatic and soul-destroying. Week after week of meetings and emails and multiple versions of clunky spreadsheets.
So when I became a Finance Director, I thought long and hard about what made organisational budgeting so awful. I then identified four key components of a happier budgeting process;
This post explores these further.
Continue reading “A happier annual budgeting process”
I’ve written more generally about how to have a smooth year end accounts process. This is a more specific piece about how to build an audit-friendly year end accounts model.
I’ve included examples for download to illustrate the principles.
Continue reading “Preparing a year end accounts model”
If you’re managing a finance team, at some point you (or someone in the team) will need to prepare some kind of year end accounts, also known as statutory accounts. I’ve been doing this for many years now and in this post I will share my observations about what makes for a smooth year end process.
The short version of this; planning in advance will always reap dividends. As you will see, most of my advice concerns things you can and should be doing well in advance of year end.
Continue reading “A smooth year end accounts process”