The Top 5 Benefits of Excel for Your Small Business

Excel isn’t just a tool used in Big Four accounting firms. In fact, close to 750 million people worldwide use Excel on a regular business for business-related functions.

If you’re unfamiliar with everything Excel can really do, your small business may be missing out.

The benefits of Excel extend far beyond tables and pie charts and have the potential to help you see data patterns that will give your business a major boost.

If you’re why excel skill levels are important for small businesses, read on to find out the top five benefits Excel can bring to you and your operation.

1. Better Bookkeeping

One of the most tangible benefits of Excel for small businesses is the Excel functions for accounting.

The app was actually originally designed to meet the needs of accountants and has now evolved to contain tools that anyone can use for flawless bookkeeping.

Excel for accounting functions includes instant expense tracking, loan calculations, tax calculators, and easy-to-understand summaries of all of your ingoings and outgoings.

With Excel, you will be able to keep track of your accounts without the need for an expensive accountancy firm.

2. Making Smarter Sales

If you’re wondering what is Excel used for in the workplace of larger companies, the simplest answer is data analysis. With small businesses too, you can use Excel to make sense of your data in order to make smarter, more informed sales.

If you’re logging all of your sales data into Excel, you can use various functions to find out which items are most popular, which items are bought with certain other items, what times are best for making sales, and so much more.

Of course, making sense of the data can be difficult for beginners, so don’t hesitate to ask the Excel Experts for advice on making Excel work for you.

3. Keeping Track of Your Team

Excel’s combination of simplicity and speed is one of the top ten features of timesheets. You do not need very high Excel proficiency levels to use the software as a tool that can help you easily keep track of everyone in your business.

Excel has several functions that serve as a useful timesheet, where all that is needed is for employees to enter their arrival times.

You can use this data for payroll, but that’s not all. You can also use it to find patterns in employee behavior and see how they might best be put to use in your business.

4. Major Time Savings

This one might seem a little more obvious. Put simply, Excel will save you time.

There are literally hundreds of shortcuts offered in Excel that allow you to turn routine, tedious tasks such as payroll and scheduling into instantaneous functions.

Mastery of Excel has the potential to save your business hundreds of hours a month, hours that can be used to help your operation grow.

5. Straightforward Data Security

While data security is a major concern for businesses of all sizes these days, it is difficult to compete with classic Microsoft Excel.

The software uses double encryption, with the option to add two-factor authentication to each spreadsheet prior to access.

The solid security features of this basic software are on par with some of the most expensive firewall apps on the market right now. Sometimes, the classics are all you need.

Learn More About the Benefits of Excel

Knowing the benefits of Excel is just the first step toward making your business more streamlined. Make sure to consult our detailed guides in the Growth Section to find out more about making your business the best that it can be.