Building Effective Budget Spreadsheets in Excel

Author: David H. Ringstrom

In this comprehensive presentation, Excel expert David Ringstrom, CPA, teaches you how to create resilient and easy-to-maintain budget spreadsheets. Among other techniques, David shows you how to separate inputs from calculations, build out a separate calculations spreadsheet, create both an operating and a cash flow budget, transform filtering tasks, and preserve key formulas.

David demonstrates every technique at least twice: first, on a PowerPoint slide with numbered steps, and second, in the subscription-based Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) version of Excel. David draws your attention to any differences in the older versions of Excel (2021, 2019, 2016 and earlier) during the presentation as well as in his detailed handouts. David also provides an Excel workbook that includes most of the examples he uses during the course.

Microsoft 365 is a subscription-based product that provides new feature updates as often as monthly. Conversely, the perpetual licensed versions of Excel have feature sets that don't change. Perpetual licensed versions have year numbers, such as Excel 2021, Excel 2019, and so on.

Publication Date: July 2022

Designed For
Practitioners seeking to build budget spreadsheets that can be updated effortlessly and contain easy-to-follow supporting calculations.

Topics Covered

• Accessing free downloadable budget templates that can be customized as needed
• Avoiding the complexity of nested IF statements with Excel's CHOOSE function
• Building operating budgets quickly based on detailed supporting schedules that provide an audit trail
• Crafting formulas to compute gross margins, projected sales, commissions, and related amounts
• Employing the SUMIF function to sum values related to multiple instances of criteria you specify
• Improving the integrity of budget spreadsheets by isolating all inputs to a single worksheet
• Improving the integrity of spreadsheets by using SUMIF to look up values in a more flexible fashion than VLOOKUP
• Improving the integrity of spreadsheets with Excel's VLOOKUP function
• Learning how the Table feature empowers you to improve the integrity of Excel spreadsheets
• Navigating directly to inputs by using Excel's Name Box, and then returning to the previous location in the workbook via the Go To command
• Preserving key formulas using hide and protect features
• Protecting sensitive information by hiding formulas within an Excel workbook

Learning Objectives

• Identify how to isolate all user entries to an inputs worksheet, while protecting all calculations and budget schedules on additional worksheets
• Recognize and apply range names and the Table feature to create resilient and easy-to-maintain spreadsheets
• Identify how to calculate borrowings from, and repayments toward, a working capital line of credit
• Identify where in the Excel's user interface the range name assigned to a cell that you've selected appears
• Recognize which part of the formula will Excel calculate first, when a portion of a formula is wrapped in parentheses
• Describe which character signifies an absolute reference within a formula
• Recognize the keyboard shortcut for the AutoSum feature

Level
Intermediate

Instructional Method
Self-Study

NASBA Field of Study
Computer Software & Applications (2 hours)

Program Prerequisites
Experience with Excel Spreadsheets Recommended.

Advance Preparation
None