All articles with 'reconcile' Tag

You are the boss of ACME Inc. And one day, both of your accounts receivables team members Sara and James come to you with two versions of the customer payment data. How do you compare these two Excel sheets and reconcile the data? In this article, let me explain the step by step process.

Do you work with accounting or finance data? You are going to love, no scratch that, adore Power Query. It can save you precious time, make you look like a hero in-front of clients and keep you sane.

In this masterclass, learn all about Power Query for accountants (and other kinds of finance people) & 5 tips.

Why Power Query?

Power Query is a data processing software. Using Power Query, you can create process driven programs (queries) to collect data, clean or reshape it, calculate things and publish final output as a table. Once you create a query in PQ, when the underlying data changes, you just refresh the query and brand new data will be fetched, cleaned and published for you.

For example, you can use Power Query to combine ledger files from various accounts to one master file with Power Query. No more VBA or manual copy pasting. Just one query and you are done.

Here is a tricky problem often faced by accountants and finance professionals: Let’s say you have 5 customers. Each of them need to pay you some money. Instead of paying the total amount in one go, they paid you in 30 small transactions. The total amount of these transactions matches how much they need to pay you. But you don’t know which customer paid which amounts. How would you reconcile the books?

If you match the transactions manually, it can take an eternity – after all there are more than 931 zillion combinations (5^30).

This is where solver can be handy. Solver can find optimal solution for problems like this before you finish your first cup of coffee.

Last week, we learned how to use formulas to reconcile (match) transactions in Excel. Today, lets take a look at even faster and simpler way to do this:

Using Pivot Tables

Here is a short video explaining the technique and why it works. See it below

Imagine you are the head of Accounts Receivable department at a large company. Drab, I know, But humor me and imagine.

Now, every month you get a transaction report.

And you want to know which numbers are matching up.

i.e, if your company gave Vendor-0002 $872.34 on 1st of April, 2014 and your received below payments from them subsequently,

• $427.77 on 1st April
• $152.88 on 2nd April
• $291.69 on 2nd April

Then you consider the account matched since the total received is same as total payable.(427.77 + 152.88 + 291.69 = 872.34).