Publications

Many financial systems do a fine job of generating standard reports, but accountants often need more. In those cases, accountants can create custom solutions in Excel, but that approach has drawbacks. For instance, a typical process may involve exporting some type of data, perhaps a trial balance, and then opening it in Excel. Once the…

In today’s accounting world, financial and operational data typically is stored in a variety of programs and formats. When accountants need to prepare a report based on data from various systems, the first step is to export the data into Excel. Typically, it is fairly easy to export the required data into Excel. But, depending…

Put your workstations on a diet, and let your server do the heavy lifting. Talk about pressure—and not just in tax season. Keeping office computer systems up and running in small and medium CPA firms is an enormous and unending responsibility. Without reliable computing and communication capabilities, your staff, your clients and your business are…

Have you ever wanted to do something in Excel only to find that it has no function for that task? That shouldn’t stop you, because Excel has a built-in ability to help you customize your own functions. The key is Excel’s macro tool, which uses software code written in Visual Basic for Applications, or VBA.…

SEARCH OUT FILES ACROSS A NETWORK WITH GOOGLE Q: In theory, going paperless is a great idea. In practice, however, the biggest obstacle, at least in my office, is not the work to convert documents into electronic files; it’s finding them afterward and retrieving them. We try to get everyone in the office to agree…

Get the Word Out How do you distribute financial reports to clients, shareholders and key people in your organization? If you’re low-tech, you probably mail them. If you’ve been following my suggestions of several years ago, you create hyperlinks in Excel files and e-mail the files so clients can drill down into them for details…

Easy-to-create macros can take over many manual processes.   Key to Instructions To help readers follow the instructions in this article, we use two different typefaces: Boldface type is used to identify the names of icons, agendas and URLs. Sans serif type indicates commands and instructions that users should type into the computer and the…

Accountants spend hours working at computers, and usually much of that time they’re doing repetitive tasks—such as opening the same group of spreadsheets or creating the same header or formatting for each new workbook and document. Wouldn’t it make sense to invest a little time to create programs that perform these repetitive jobs with just…

In the late 1980s, most accountants put aside their columnar pads and calculators and advanced to computers. In some respects, that was a big step, but in reality, very little actually changed: The financial reports were simply transferred from paper to the computer screen. Although the efficiency of report generation was improved, the reports were…

IF YOU WANT TO distribute financial reports throughout your organization electronically rather than on paper, give the reports a drill-down capability and not have to use e-mail technology, there’s a simple way that uses only your existing hardware and software. THE PROCESS APPLIES the hyperlink function of Microsoft Excel. It’s relatively easy to set up…