Overview
Preparing financial reports in Excel doesn't have to involve repetitive copying, manual updates, and rebuilding the same reports every reporting period. In this practical session, author and Excel expert David H. Ringstrom, CPA, demonstrates how modern Excel features can help accountants and financial professionals streamline recurring reporting tasks while improving accuracy and consistency.
You'll learn how to organize financial data with Excel Tables, reshape exported accounting data with Power Query, and build reusable reporting workflows that are easy to refresh as new information becomes available. David will also demonstrate techniques for creating more dynamic financial reports with modern lookup formulas, workbook templates, conditional formatting, and charts that make key trends and variances easier to communicate.
Whether you prepare monthly financial statements, management reports, budget analyses, or other recurring financial reports, you'll discover practical techniques that reduce manual effort and help you spend more time analyzing results instead of assembling reports.
David has more than 30 years of experience as a spreadsheet and accounting software consultant and speaker. He has presented more than 2,500 live webinars and is the author or co-author of ten books, including Microsoft 365 Excel All-in-One for Dummies, Microsoft 365 Excel for Dummies, Exploring Microsoft Excel's Hidden Treasures, and QuickBooks Online for Dummies.
In his webinars, David demonstrates every technique twice: first on a PowerPoint slide with numbered steps and then live in Excel for Microsoft 365 for Windows. He points out differences in Excel 2024, 2021, and 2019 throughout the presentation and in his detailed handouts. Attendees also receive an Excel workbook containing many of the examples demonstrated during the session, making it easy to practice the techniques afterward.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this webinar, participants will be able to:
· Organize financial data using modern Excel tools to improve reporting accuracy and efficiency.
· Use Power Query to automate importing, cleaning, and transforming accounting data.
· Apply modern Excel functions to simplify formulas and reduce manual work.
· Create dynamic financial reports that are easy to refresh and maintain.
· Visualize financial performance using charts, conditional formatting, and other reporting tools.
· Implement best practices to produce professional, consistent, and reliable financial reports.
Areas Covered
· Organizing financial data using Excel Tables and structured references
· Creating reusable workbook templates for monthly, quarterly, and annual reporting
· Importing, cleaning, and transforming accounting data with Power Query
· Refreshing reports automatically instead of rebuilding them from scratch
· Using modern lookup functions (XLOOKUP, XMATCH, and dynamic arrays) to simplify reporting
· Creating dynamic summaries with PivotTables and PivotCharts
· Highlighting trends, variances, and exceptions using conditional formatting
· Building waterfall charts to visualize financial performance and budget variances
· Applying professional formatting, cell styles, and themes for consistent financial reports
· Best practices for creating accurate, efficient, and presentation-ready financial reports
