How Small Businesses Use Microsoft Excel
For those that are familiar with business, the number one desktop productivity tool of choice is Microsoft Excel, it’s hard to imagine life without it. Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet tool that is used in millions of large businesses across the world and provides tremendous value to small business owners as well. Read on to learn how small businesses can use Microsoft Excel to make their life easier.
Scheduling
A good way to keep your employees coming in and on time is to have an easy to understand schedule. Small business owners know that making and consistently updating a schedule can be a hassle. People constantly call in sick and in certain industries employees often change shifts with their coworkers. Fortunately, Microsoft Excel is probably the best scheduling tool on the market.
A simple way to use Microsoft Excel to schedule is this: on the column enter the days of the week and on the rows enter the shift times. In the open slots simply enter the name of the people of whom you want working the shift and in a mere minutes, you’ll able to create a working, easy to update schedule.
Organizing Data
Big business today thrives on the collection of data. With data, you can learn the habits of your customers, and apply that to marketing. Here’s how you can use Microsoft Excel to organize data.
If you use the pivot table feature, you’ll be able to organize a huge amount of data into an easy to understand table. Simple click on the pivot table tool icon, select your desired parameters and Microsoft will save you the headache of organizing your data for you so you can easily read and understand the information! This feature comes in hand when you have to look at hundreds of lines of data.
Accounting
Throw away your old accounting ledger and step into the future. Microsoft Excel is one of the best accounting programs on the market! You can very easily set up Excel to balance your checkbook and handle basic (and complex) accounting problems.
Simply set up the columns to reflect debits and credits, manually enter the appropriate date and let Microsoft Excel handle the rest! (Through the use of specific formulas) A cool feature of excel is once you have enough data, you can actually use excel to create graphs to give you a visual to all of your information. This can help you in understanding the data that you are working with and identify any relevant trends.
Sales Tracking
Every business owner knows that they need sales in order to survive. A great way to keep track of your sales is to use Microsoft Excel to record all of your sales numbers. Here’s where Excel gets to be pretty cool: you can use the program to compare year over year sales visually with its graph feature. Additionally, once you have enough data, you can actually forecast your future sales! This is one of the greatest benefits to small business owners as having an idea of how you will preform in the future can allow you to make immediate changes today to ensure success.
Essentially Microsoft Excel is the Swiss army knife of all business programs. If you own a small business, learning how to use Microsoft Excel will make your life easier, guaranteed. If you want to get more organized in your business, I recommend reaching out to professional coaches who can help you master Excel’s secrets.