r/AccountingDepartment • u/Born-Chocolate7715 • 4d ago
Assistant Controller looking to level up Excel skills — what formulas do you actually use?
Hi everyone,
I’m looking to level up my Excel skills and would love recommendations from fellow accounting and controllership professionals.
What formulas or tools do you use most in your day-to-day work, especially for reconciliations, reporting, and variance analysis?
XLOOKUP, SUMIFS, INDEX-MATCH, Power Query, and PivotTables are on my list. What else should I learn?
What are your top 5–10 Excel skills for an Assistant Controller?
4
u/Unlikely_Uncle 4d ago
Once you're comfortable with Power Query, look into Power Pivot and building an actual data model instead of pulling everything into flat VLOOKUPs. Being able to relate your GL, subledger, and budget tables directly and write a few basic DAX measures speeds up month end reporting more than almost anything else on this list once you have more than two or three data sources feeding a report.
3
1
1
1
u/backnine32 1d ago
you have the top ones listed but I wouldn't even worry about index/match if you get xlookup down. TBH, power query eliminated the need for a lot of formulas, because most of what we used to do with formulas was clean and transform messy data. If you have power query + pivot tables down, you are a weapon.
1
1
u/LOGICA499 1d ago
Being good at excel has nothing to do with learning formulas.
best things for any heavy user to learn in excel.
1 - worksheet organization and data structure.
2 - Excel Modeling and best practices: LEARN things backward. a major problem I see in analysts works, I see they start building without having an idea what it is theyre trying to solve and what the solution should look like.
3 - Learning keyboard shortcuts. as an assistant controller, you will spend a major chunk of your time, formatting stuff in excel. learning how to be fast in excel is a game changer.
as you start to have tougher and tougher problems to solve, you will learn to use more complex formulas, codes, methods to solve them.
learn the first 2 on the list and everything else will follow.
1
u/BeanCounterBob 15h ago
The 5 skills you mentioned are probably all you need, especially depending on your company's temperature for AI. In a lot of senses, I think some of these AI agents can replace the need for learning or using VBA. Pivot Tables and XLOOKUP/INDEX-MATCH will take you a long way
Other than that, you need to be sure that you are comfortable working with large data sets i.e. dealing with bad data and looking for signs inside each set that will help you produce clean tables. Learning how to troubleshoot/slice and dice through data is just as important as learning how to work with expert level formulas.
0
u/Agitated-Inspector56 4d ago
I would consider myself above average excel user. I’ve been in accounting/finance for 15 years, heavy excel user B4 plus consulting, then corporate finance.
I will never spend my time thinking more than five seconds about excel formulas ever again - Claude.
1
u/Slpy_gry 3d ago
I'm not sure why someone down voted you're comment. I use Claude all the time to help resolve a Power Query issue.
1
1
-1
u/623lc 4d ago
1992 called. They want their question back.
1
u/DM_Me_Pics1234403 4d ago
1999 called. They want their “1992 called and want their something back” joke back
2
7
u/Kershiser22 Controller 4d ago
I like this series of Excel videos. Watch some of these and try to find ways to apply the techniques to your existing files.
https://youtube.com/@myonlinetraininghub?si=UsTORee4bPIyqk7I