Excel training for auditors

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.

This was well over 20 years ago, and Excel has changed a lot since then. I’ve also built up a lot more experience and have more ideas about what might be useful for auditors.

For example, it’s helpful to learn about duplicate detection and formula evaluation. It’s useful to understand the different types of error messages that you might get. For more advanced course, I might show various ways to match one set of data to another – from XLOOKUPs to a special data validation hack.

What could possibly go wrong?

Above all, a key feature of Excel training for auditors has to be emphasising the number of things that could go wrong. While I haven’t seen any Excel horrors in the same league as these, I’ve seen all sorts of examples of misaligned ranges, incomplete formulas, numbers formatted as text – all easy mistakes to make that will give you the wrong answer.

It was great fun designing the training in such a way that would highlight how errors might be made and how to spot them. I’d love to do more of it.

While this particular training was designed for new trainees, I am used to training people at all levels in Excel.

I charge £850 to plan, design and deliver a day’s bespoke Excel training in your workplace. I always use a pre-course questionnaire to assess levels, and design the course around any specific requirements your firm has. If you have a regular trainee programme, I could deliver subsequent repeat courses at a lower price. Please get in touch to find out more.

Image: Photo by Bruno Nascimento on Unsplash