From the course: Excel for Accountants

Accounting tasks and career roles - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel for Accountants

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Accounting tasks and career roles

- [Instructor] In this video, we'll talk about accounting and the most common tasks and approaches that accountants face in their daily lives. Now, accounting is all about measuring and analyzing what's going on at a firm, right? Traditional accounting is generally broken out into either audit or tax, for example. But our focus is really going to be a little bit of both. We'll be looking at accountants for small and medium-sized businesses, large firms, and for business valuation as a whole. Now, in the small firm world, traditionally, the two most important tasks are payroll and business taxes. A lot of small firms will use outside accountants and bookkeepers for this. But whether this is done internally or externally, probably the most common software used for small business is QuickBooks. However, Excel is an alternative. Now, don't get me wrong, QuickBooks is great, but Excel can speed up certain tasks and enable better flexibility and analytics on things like expense categorization. At larger firms, in-house accountants and bookkeepers track transactions using the general ledger. Now, there's a lot of purpose-built software packages out there to help with general ledger, or GL, construction and tracking, but you could use Excel as a versatile, generic alternative. We'll talk about how that would work in practice. Finally, when it comes to accounting, one of the traditional tasks for accountants is putting together financial statements. This is definitely a skillset you will need. Business valuation relies on these financial statements. In fact, accountants are often asked to come up with a business valuation based on accounting statements that they have prepared or at least evaluated. This can be done cleanly and easily in Excel using many of the special functions and formulas that Excel has available. Hopefully, at this point, you have a clearer understanding of the value that accounting provides to firms and the usefulness of Excel as a tool within the field.

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