Microsoft EXCEL and AUDITING

  • Creator
    Topic
  • #187632
    NumberCruncher4lyfe
    Participant

    I just accepted an Audit position and am a bit worried because in my interview the Audit Manager kept asking how i felt about my technical skills such as using Microsoft Excel. I assured him that my skills were great in the fact that I have a MOS 2010 Excel Specialist Certification. However, that certification only covers the basics of excel like how to color tabs but nothing advanced like VLOOKUPS and Pivots. I am a bit rusty since i’ve gotten my certification because i don’t work in excel with my job as an accounting clerk and I’ve been away from school for about 1.5 years now. I know it may sound stupid but I forgot alot of information. Will this hurt me when i start auditing or is it easy to just google how to do something and do it that way. I just don’t want my manager to think im incompetent and say to me “Oh I thought you were the bomb at this” when i’m really not. Any suggestions on what I can be doing until now and my start date?

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
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    Replies
  • #585899
    stoleway
    Participant

    I will advice you to start sharpening your skills even before you start, there are lots of excel training resources available online. Others will train you on how to do certain things with excel, but there's only a few of them in the accounting world.

    REG -63│ 84!!
    BEC- 59│70│ 71 │78!
    AUD- 75!
    FAR- 87!

    Mass-CPA

    #585900
    fjabay
    Participant

    I used a youtube channel to brush on on some excel skills. Excellsfun is the name of the channel and the lessons are categorized into basic, intermediate and advanced. You will download all the spreadsheets that you need for the classes and just follow his tutorial. It's a great way to practice!

    AUD - 07/14/14 - 88

    #585901
    NicoleL
    Participant

    If you said your Excel skills were great, you should definitely be pretty familiar with pivot tables and vlookups as well as sumif statements. You probably won't have to create them right off the start but you should know how they work and how to modify existing ones.

    FAR - 93 (YAY!!!!)
    REG - 93 (Double YAY!)
    BEC - 87 (Whew!)
    AUD - 96 (DONE!!!!!)

    #585902
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    When I was in interviews – partners asked me about excel experience and I said I was pretty good. One laughed at me and said you don't have any idea yet. She turned out to be right. Prior year work papers help quite a bit – you'll be fine!

    #585903
    stoleway
    Participant

    But seriously lets be honest, If an interviewer ask me about my excel skills, I will probably say I'm good even though I'm not good. They can only weed you out if they make you take a test to prove it…lol

    REG -63│ 84!!
    BEC- 59│70│ 71 │78!
    AUD- 75!
    FAR- 87!

    Mass-CPA

    #585904
    mikiluv
    Member

    hi @stoleway: sorry this is OT, but how did you increase your REG score? I am consistently getting 60s. would love to see a huge increase like that as well. thx.

    #585905
    stoleway
    Participant

    @mikiluv

    In my first exam, I relied heavily on peoples advice NOT TO practice simulations, it turns out they were wrong IMO.

    The next retake, I decided to change my study habits and tackle the simulations the same way I was doing for mcqs.

    This helped me gain broader understanding of the material and really resulted in success. Hope this helps?

    REG -63│ 84!!
    BEC- 59│70│ 71 │78!
    AUD- 75!
    FAR- 87!

    Mass-CPA

    #585906
    mikiluv
    Member

    @ Stoleway, what material did you use? could you also expand on your study habits if you do not mind? thx for your reply.

    #585907
    stoleway
    Participant

    Read this thread @mikiluv

    https://www.another71.com/cpa-exam-forum/topic/is-there-an-overlap-btn-aud-bec

    REG -63│ 84!!
    BEC- 59│70│ 71 │78!
    AUD- 75!
    FAR- 87!

    Mass-CPA

    #585908
    NumberCruncher4lyfe
    Participant

    Thank you all for the advice, I will take that into consideration going forward. I have signed up for an Excel Crash Course.

    #585909
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    I have learned the most about Excel from using it and pushing it to its limits. They may sound silly and simple, but it's true. Take any workbook you have and find a way to make it better. Someone else on A71 asked me how to learn more about Excel recently (if I could recommend specific books, courses, websites, etc.) and here is what I told her:

    The best I can tell you use to bookmark Google and find a project you want to do, then figure out how to do it. I'm entirely self-taught with Google's help, so don't know of any review courses, but know you can learn a lot with Google.

    Finding challenging projects before it's crunch time at work can be a challenge though, so just start with what you have. Do you have a spreadsheet where you track your bank account, maybe with budgetary categories? If so, try to find ways to extract and use data. Think you can set up a formula to calculate expenses in a budget category in the current month (without having to reset the SUM range)? How about setting the budget column to turn red if it exceeds the budget by 5% or more? Maybe make another sheet that pulls data from the bank records and uses pivot tables and charts to show expenses by category, payee, etc. Or maybe you want to create a formula so that you can type a payee in A2 and see YTD expenses… Next maybe you try creating a macro so that when you export data from your bank's website, the data is format to copy and paste into your bank spreadsheet. But the bank doesn't have your budget categories, so maybe you want to use vlookup or index and match to create some weird formula that looks for the last time this payee was paid and tells you what budget category it was.

    These are just random ideas off the top of my head, but things like this are how I learned Excel. After all, necessity is the mother of invention! Most of all, though, no one will ever know everything about Excel, so the best thing to do is to learn how to learn with it (aka Google). My biggest things to say are super useful and you should be sure you're familiar with are filters, conditional formatting, vlookup, and macros. Pivot tables can simplify your life a lot too. These might be things you're already comfortable with, but if not, they're well worth playing with. None of these things are really scary just take a little bit of familiarity. VLOOKUP scared me to death the first couple times I used it but now I use it often for simple things just cause it's so handy and easy to use!

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