File Date… and little Bites that’ll fill you up

Do you have any reports or spreadsheets that are dated?  I mean, do you have a report that you have to submit every Monday?  Or a monthly Bank Reconciliation?  Well, what if instead of having to change the date each time you save the file (or get embarrassed because you forgot), the date was auto-populated?  Good News Part One: It’s not that hard to do; here’s the formula:

=DATEVALUE(CONCATENATE(MID(MID(CELL(“filename”,A2),FIND(“AddingDate_”,CELL(“filename”,A2))
+LEN(“AddingDate_”),6),3,2),”/”,RIGHT(MID(CELL(“filename”,A2),FIND(“AddingDate_”,CELL(“filename”,A2))
+LEN(“AddingDate_”),6),2),”/”,LEFT(MID(CELL(“filename”,A2),FIND(“AddingDate_”,CELL(“filename”,A2))
+LEN(“AddingDate_”),6),2)))

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Trimmed Mean

Companies are always looking for trends.  One common statistic is average.  What is the average monthly expenditure for travel and entertainment?  On average, how many units of each SKU are sold?  How many calls per day, on average, does our Call Center receive?  All these are common questions and present a picture for management to look at in an attempt to better understand the business.

But just taking the average can be misleading and problematic.  What if there was a trade show in July and the entire Sales and Management Teams went to Phoenix, Arizona for a week?  That would obviously skew the travel and entertainment numbers.  During the Holidays, mainly because it’s the end of the year, your company sells twice as many calendars as it does the rest of the year.  So forecasting for February based on the annual average would be a mistake.  And let’s take the example of the Call Center. Read more of this post

7 Ways to Increase the Efficiency of your Accounting Dept.

It’s good to know that at least some of the things in which I vehemently believe (process refinement, full leverage of business applications, IT department inclusion) are echoed by others in the Accounting world.  I read this article, shared with the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Network on LinkedIn by Yelena Z.  It’s a great read.

7 ways to make your accounting department more efficient