Want to download financial statements in Excel?
In this article, we'll take a look at the steps that you need to complete to prepare a basic set of financial statements in Excel. Most financial statements are compiled from trial balance values and this is also our recommended approach.
You therefore need to have a trial balance available to be able to prepare your financial statements. Most financial statement software programs start with a trial balance which means that you should have an accounting or bookkeeping solution which enables you to record individual income and expense entries to compile your trial balance.
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Once you have your trial balance ready, each account in your trial balance needs to be linked to the appropriate section in the financial statements. The easiest way of setting up these links is to use pre-defined reporting class codes which are basically defined for each line in the financial statements.
If you've defined a code for each line in the financial statements, you can link each of your accounts in your trial balance to the appropriate codes so that the linked account is included in the appropriate line on the financial statements. A SUMIFS formula can typically be used for this calculation.
Now that you've defined a link between your trial balance and financial statements, you should be able to include all the trial balance info in your financial statements but what about financial information which is not included in the trial balance?
Most financial statements consist of information which can be obtained from a trial balance and information which is typically not included on a trial balance. Examples are depreciation rates, asset addition or disposal amounts, par value of shares, contingent liabilities and more.
When preparing financial statements in Excel, you would therefore also need to set up an efficient way of including the information which typically does not form part of a trial balance. Our preference is to also use reporting class codes for this purpose and to link the affected lines in the financial statements to a sheet with the information not found on a trial balance.
After setting up all the links to your trial balance and other financial information, the next step would be to make it easy to switch between financial years so that you do not need to create these links for each set of financial statements that you prepare. The easiest way of accomplishing this is to use a formula like VLOOKUP or MATCH to pick up the correct annual column based on a user-defined cell for selecting the required financial year.
We've only really covered the basics here but as you can see, it can be a relatively complex exercise to prepare a model which enables users to download financial statements in an Excel format. Especially if you want the financial statements to be practical and easy to use!
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