Using Excel to Create an Expense Report
How to Create an Expense Report in Excel: An expense report will help to give persons in your organization a brief overview of your company’s expenses. It can also be used as a simple hack to manage your budget to a certain degree although it’s not a full blown replacement for other methods.
Creating an expense report can be quite easy. Excel is a popular tool you can use to create it. For those who don’t know what Excel is but has an idea of what it is. It’s basically a spreadsheet tool you can use to insert data into. But it’s not just about that because once the data is inserted in the different cells and organized properly. You can then analyze that data and put them into graphs, charts and other diagrams.
What makes Excel so powerful is the software that’s working in the background. That can allow you to make formulas with functions and complex calculations. Otherwise from using Excel to create an expense report you can download other software off of the internet. That could help you to automate your workflow. These software may cost you a bit of cash but they can be worth it.
On the other hand using Excel can be quite easy although some persons tend to think otherwise. You can see a tutorial of how easy it is to create an expense report below. It’s even more flexible because the spreadsheets at first look like a blank canvas. That you can add your personal touch to and manipulate the data to your preferences.
Steps on How to Create an Expense Report in Excel:
Firstly you are going to gather all of your organization’s expense data. At the top of your spreadsheet you are going to label your report. So you are going to have 5 columns with the following label: name, department, position, manager and date.
Next create 8 columns for this report these are going to be named date, description, mortgage, office supplies, legal fees, insurance, accounting expenditures and total. For the total column you are going to add up all your expenses to see what they have amount to.
You can do this in Excel using a feature called autosum. Select all the columns that you want to add up. Click on the home tab, click on autosum and you are done.
Most of the heavy lifting is now done as stated before this was going to be a simple expense report. Another option which wasn’t stated above that you can use, is to download templates.
To use templates you can make a simple search on the internet for it and you can see a lot of free download options pop up. After you have chosen one that you like.
You can load it up in Excel and begin to use it immediately. It would be great to follow the simple two steps shown above. Knowing some of the inner workings of Excel will help you to better understand the template. You can see an example below.