One of the coolest spreadsheet templates I've ever build was this financial statement producer. It does almost everything you can ask and has logic/formulas built in for all accounting journal entries possible. It works with accrual or cash basis as well.
Excel is really good for accountants that need to prepare financial statements. It is something that doesn't take up a ton of resources. No matter if you are a large corporation, a small business, or a medium business, preparing your financial statements is something that Excel can do well. The use cases are literally limitless.
When you go and look at the financial reporting system EDGAR, it is where you will find and all sorts of public company filings / reports / financial statements. Do you notice something on there? Everything looks like it came right out of a spreadsheet.
The columns represent periods of time and sub-totals of periods and the rows represent key financial line items and sub-totals. There will NEVER be a financial statement that can't be prepared / built in Excel. It will never need that much data or computation power. This was true in 1997, 2007, 2017, and in 2023.
The tricky part is coding all the formulas so your statements all link together and balance out. Especially the Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement. Use formulas to feed the proper calculations and it is a beautiful thing.
You will run into problems in cases where you are trying to populate revenue with actual transaction data and there are millions of transactions. That will be a problem unless you are using Power BI. In those cases, Excel is good at being used to input aggregate data so when you have monthly sales and monthly expenses, those will likely be pulled from reports that are using the low-level detailed data. All you would input into Excel is the monthly totals.
Check out more helpful accounting spreadsheets and trackers here.
Article found in Accounting and Finance.
