Excel for Accounting (Intermediate)

What you'll learn

Lay out finance-grade workbooks another accountant can pick up
Encode rules with conditional logic, and map messy descriptions to a chart of accounts
Clean an export nobody prepared and make it reliable
Run a full bookkeeping cycle and reconcile a bank statement that will not balance
Produce P&L, balance sheet and cash flow from one ledger, with a dashboard on top

Week by week

Every week, what you can do by the end of it.

1Foundations & finance-grade formatting5h
Workbook best practice; cell references — relative, absolute, mixed; named ranges
ChatGPT: "explain this formula" · Copilot tour
2Conditional & logical formulas5h
SUMIFS/COUNTIFS/AVERAGEIFS — totals by account, category, date, cost centre
Copilot/ChatGPT: turn plain English into a SUMIFS
3Lookups & account mapping5h
VLOOKUP / HLOOKUP and modern XLOOKUP
AI to convert VLOOKUP ↔ XLOOKUP ↔ INDEX/MATCH and debug `#N/A`

What you'll build

You leave with work you can show, not only a certificate.

One workbook grows across the course into a full accounting system:
Structured Chart of Accounts + formatting (Wk 1–3)
Clean transactions table with dropdowns (Wk 4)
PivotTable financial summary (Wk 5)
General ledger + Trial Balance + Bank reconciliation (Wk 6)
Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, Depreciation, Payroll (Wk 7)
Dashboard + KPIs (Wk 8) → Capstone

Tools you'll use

Microsoft Excel (365 preferred for Copilot; desktop fine). Google Sheets equivalents noted

Afterwards

Graduate can keep a full set of books in Excel, produce reconciliations and financial statements, run payroll and depreciation, analyse with PivotTables, and build finance dashboards — with an AI-accelerated workflow and a portfolio workbook to show. Roles: Bookkeeper · Accounts/Finance Officer · Accounts Payable/Receivable · Audit/Finance Assistant · freelance SME bookkeeping. Strong support for ICAN/ACCA practical work and a natural feeder to Ascent Finance tools