Top 10 Accounting KPIs and How to Calculate them in Excel?

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We can calculate any Finance & Accounting KPI values using Excel easily. In this article, I  am sharing the top 10 accounting KPI calculations. These are…

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top-10-accounting-kpis and how to calculate them with Excel

💰 Net Profit Margin

Net Profit Margin = Net Profit / Sales

Positive profit margin indicates business is profitable while negative indicates the business is in loss.

net profit margin formula

📈 Revenue Growth

Revenue Growth = This year revenue / last year revenue – 1

Tells you how much revenue has grown compared to previous period. You can use the same logic to calculate COGS growth, profit growth too.

Revenue growth formula

➗ Quick Ratio

Quick Ratio = (Total Current Assets – Inventory) / Total Current Liabilities

Tells you how strong the liquidity of a business is.

QR of 1 or more indicates the business is able to pay off its current debts using the cash or cash equivalents it has on hand. 

QR under 1 indicates the business would struggle to pay off its current debts with what it has on hand.

quick ratio calculation excel

📦 Inventory Turnover

Inventory Turnover = COGS / Average Inventory

Inventory turnover measures how quickly a business is able to offload the inventory. 

The actual value of Inventory Turnover and how to interpret it changes from business to business. As a rule, a higher Inventory Turnover indicates more efficient inventory cycle.

Inventory Turnover

📆 Days Inventory Outstanding

Days Inventory Outstanding = Average Inventory / Cost of Goods Sold x 365

DIO or Days Inventory Outstanding measures how much inventory a business is carrying. A lower number indicates well oiled manufacturing & inventory cycles while a higher number indicates sluggish demand or oversupply. 

Please note that the typical values change from industry to industry and depend on other macro-economic factors.

For example, a vegetable business would have low DIO as the goods are naturally perishable, while a furniture business might have a high DIO as the goods do take long time to sell.

days inventory outstanding formula

👥 Avg. Revenue Per User (ARPU)

ARPU = Total Revenues / Total Users

ARPU or Avg. Revenue per User reflects the amount of revenue generated per user. This is a useful measure in service business (especially software as a service or SAAS or web).

ARPU excel formula

💹 Net Present Value

NPV = NPV(rate, cash flows)

Net present value indicates the current (or present) values of a series of cashflows that occur in future. We can use the NPV function in Excel to calculate this if the cashflows are uniformly spaced.

NPV is an extremely useful calculation to understand the financial soundness of a business decision.

Learn more about NPV & IRR functions in Excel.

NPV Calculation Excel

💸 Compound Interest

Compound Interest = Principal * (1+rate of interest) ^ number of years – Principal

Excel doesn’t have a compound interest function, but we can easily calculate the same using a simple formula. 

Learn more about compound interest & CAGR with Excel.

compound interest excel calculation

📈 CAGR (Compounded Annual Growth Rate)

CAGR = RRI(duration, opening value, closing value)

CAGR measures the rate at which a business grew over a period of time. For example, if we say Apple grew at 10% CAGR since 2018 to 2023, it means, every year the sales of Apple went up by 10% compared to the previous year from 2018.

Excel doesn’t have a CAGR function but we can use the reverse IRR function – RRI to calculate the CAGR.

AAGR vs. CAGR:

AAGR or Average Annual Growth Rate simply measures the average of individual yearly growth rates (same as Revenue Growth we calculated in #2 above). 

Consider adding AAGR (Average Annual Growth Rate) to your analysis as sometimes CAGR is hard to explain to others.

Learn more about compound interest & CAGR with Excel.

CAGR using Excel

📉 Depreciation

Depreciation = the value of an asset lost during a period

Excel offers many functions to calculate depreciation of your assets or equipment. You can use below methods:

  • Straight Line Method: This depreciates the asset value by the same amount every year until the end of its life. We can use SLN function for this.
  • Declining Balance Method: This depreciates the asset value by same percentage every year. You can use DB function in Excel to calculate this.
  • Double Declining Balance Method: This uses an accelerated DB method to depreciate assets faster in the initial years.
  • Variable Depreciation Method: You can use a mix of either SLN or Declining methods depending on your needs using the VDB function in Excel.

Learn more about Depreciation Calculations in Excel.

Depreciation Calculations in Excel

📺 Top 10 Accounting KPIs - Video

Learn more about all these calculations using the video below. You can also see it on my channel here.

📄 Top 10 Accounting KPIs - Excel Workbook

Click here to download the sample file with all these calculations.

It has all the formulas & sample data for you to learn and practice.

🙋‍♂️ Need more?

Let me know the in the comments if you are looking for any additional Accounting / Finance KPI calculations. I will include them in this page as time permits.

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41 Responses to “How to use Excel Data Model & Relationships”

  1. Ashish Youngy says:

    Data is Excel 2013 behaves so much like a OLAP cube when using with PivotTables. And this is actually wow. Consider learning not just DAX but MDX too 🙂 Happy Excel

    @Chandoo.. Have a nice and safe time in US. Best Wishes. And when they are publishing your interview in Entrepreneur 🙂

  2. Buzz says:

    I have been using PowerPivot in Excel 2010. My understanding was (via PowerPivot Pro blog) that Power Pivot would NOT be available in Excel 2013 in all versions; my recollection is that it was only going to be available in certain enterprise subscription editions. Thus, for individual users, it will no longer be available? For that reason I have moved some of my projects to Tableau, and do not expect to upgrade to Excel 2013.
    Can you confirm the availability of Power Pivot for all Excel 2013 users , or will it be restricted and unavailable for some users?

  3. Oz says:

    Just this weekend I upgraded from Home Premium to Professional Plus and spent time with Power View and PowerPivot.

    Up to that point I never saw myself in VLOOKUP Hell, and it may not be going away any time soon. I'm surprised to discover how many of my clients are still on Excel 2003. And then I have Mac users who don't have a lot of this great stuff available to them at all.

    These are great features and I'm going to dive into the Data Models. Unfortunately, I suspect, for me, the practical use may be limited to blogposts because I can't teach Power View in my workshops or send a client a spreadsheet that has a Power View in it.

    • thundom says:

      Hi OZ,

      I think the Microsoft would only upgrade the excel to a certain level instead of making it so powerful that it might threat their BI product. You know these "powerful" stuff can be easily done with a entry level crystal reports version.

      Glad to listen to ur opinion on it.

      I spent quite some time and energy on Excel and used it a lot, but now I am focusing energy on BI software like crystal reports.

    • thundom says:

      We both know that based on the technology today. All the time we spend on the Macro and advanced function of Excel can be done easily with other softwares which costs only hundreds of bucks.

      • Hui... says:

        @Thondom
        I don't think Excel tries to be the solver of all problems
        It is a generic tool
        Which for about 95% of people will do what they want 95% of the time
        There will always be specifics where specific custom software will do better than Excel
        It is the commonness of Excel which means that I can send a model to you and it will work , most of the time, that is its strength, of course combined with its flexility in being able to be adapted to suit most needs

        • thundom says:

          Hi Hui,
          You are right.

          But,

          for the business and individual, who spend too much resource on Excel to meet their BI requirements and other processing requests.

          Should they open their eyes to other ways to do it, in this age? Especially for many people try too much time to process stuff with thousands lines of macro programming.

          It is just as when human being created gun fire, the martial arts would not be that effective.

          Ppl need to be prodent when they choose their solution.

          • Hi guys, I just came across your conversation. I have an example of BI vs. Excel stuff. Here in Russia there is an ERP-system called "1C". It became a defacto standart for accounting, planning and BI / analytics. It is positioned as a flexible and powerful system and it really is.
            But its reporting abilities aren't user-friendly (or maybe just not me-friendly).
            Many reports require programming and all those SQL things, so that is common for a company to have a couple of programmers who develop and code those reports.
            So the common solution is to export data to Excel and then process it to be more suitable for further analysis or reporting.
            Well, it's obviously not a rule of thumb that special BI software can outperform Excel in day-to-day routine.

  4. Tris says:

    Hi Chandoo, thanks for publishing great Excel information. Pardon the ignorance as I havent used Data Model nor PowerPivot. But having seen your video clip on PowerPivot, how does Data Model differ from PowerPivot - the "process" seems familiar? Have a great day! And Excel to new heights! Regards,

  5. Nolberto says:

    Excellent posting, some pride themselves for having sheets with thousands of formulas or complicated formulas, but in the end the important thing is to work as little as possible.

    • Oz says:

      @Nolberto let's not gloat yet. Some people are forced to have thousands of complicated formulas when they don't have the fancy tools. I'm sad for the 2003 users who have to use SUMPRODUCT when the rest of us have SUMIFS available.

      In the end, I think the important thing is clean, trustworthy data--however you arrive at it. People survived more than 300 years with slide rules and paper. No PowerPivot for the Wright Brothers.

  6. koi says:

    hi chandoo,

    i added 2 column into sales, 1st column vlookup customer ID to CUST sheet to get the male or female, then 2nd column vlookup Product ID to Product sheet to get the product name, then after that i make pivot table out of sales sheet.

    but then the result is really different from yours

    the purposes is just try to do the vlookup vs add to data model to see if they get same result

    thanks

  7. koi says:

    ups sorry, didnt see that you're filtering using slicer..then it is good now the result are same with less effort 🙂

    thanks

  8. SPrasad says:

    Hi Chandoo, .I am interested to know whether we can build a star schema or snow flake data models through relations in Excel? (trying to correlate with Qlikview)

    • Chandoo says:

      Hi there,

      You can create a Star schema for sure. Snow-flake is possible too. As long as all relationships are one to many (or one to one) anything is possible.

      • Nestavaro says:

        What if customer.profession change its value after sometime?
        Supposed we have monthly data for Sales. What if one customer is a doctor in Feb, then a pilot in October, for example?

        How to build data model for such that situation?

        Thank you.

  9. Raghavendra Shanbog says:

    Hello ,
    I find this option similar to that of MS Access.
    In MS Access as well we have relationship concept and once you create a relationship, you can start creating number of queries based on that.
    But MS Access is not so user friendly and basically its database. Good that we are getting those options/functions in Excel.
    Thanks for sharing this info.

    Regards,
    Raghavendra Shanbog

  10. What is star schema and snow flake.??? Can we have next article on that if it is useful for us???

  11. Roberto says:

    Hi there, can anyone help? I tried testing this out in Excel using two tables. When I go to the Data tab the Relationships button does not appear at all. I am using Microsoft version 14.0.4760.1000, Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010. Does this version have this capability? Or is there an add-in required?

  12. […] even a layperson can perform if they have the almighty Excel 2010 and PowerPivot installed. Or Excel 2013′s Data Model, which lets you mash up data from Excel Tables and serve them up directly as PivotTables with not a […]

  13. Chandeep Chhabra says:

    Chandoo/Hui,

    The dates grouping feature does not seem to work in Data Model. Is that true or am I making a mistake somewhere?

  14. Jay says:

    I don't think this is really for "lookups"...

    Try creating a pivot with sale ID and customer name in row fields. It will give you ALL customer names per sale ID.

    You'd need to use RELATED function in a new column in powerpivot if you want something equivalent to "vlookup"

  15. Aslam says:

    Please explain the difference between data model and power pivot, the functions of both of them are different and similar
    thanks

  16. […] Handling large volumes of data in Excel—Since Excel 2013, the “Data Model” feature in Excel has provided support for larger volumes of data than the 1M row limit per worksheet. Data Model also embraces the Tables, Columns, Relationships representation as first-class objects, as well as delivering pre-built commonly used business scenarios like year-over-year growth or working with organizational hierarchies. For several customers, the headroom Data Model is sufficient for dealing with their own large data volumes. In addition to the product documentation, several of our MVPs have provided great content on Power Pivot and the Data Model. Here are a couple of articles from Rob Collie and Chandoo. […]

  17. Bernadette Savage says:

    I need to use a slicer to allow a user to select vendor by name. In the background, I need to obtain the vendor ID to link to multiple datasets where the name may not be spelled consistently. Any advice?

  18. Andrea says:

    I've tried this in Excel 2016. It works great.
    I can even create Cube Formulas on the Data model after I've inserted the pivot table.
    Just for the fun of it, I tried to see if I could do Cube Formulas without creating the pivot table in advance. I can define Cube members, but it seems as if the measure part is playing tricks on me.

    I can't get a Cube Value for Chocolates sold to Male customers.
    With the Pivot created the formula looks like this (and works fine)
    =CUBEVALUE("ThisWorkbookDataModel";"[Customer].[Gender].&[Male]";"[Product].[Category].&[Chocolates]";"[Measures].[Sum of Quantity]")

    Does anyone know how I can solve this, or am I asking the impossible?

  19. Kwabena Anaafi says:

    I want to see the video on this topic

  20. nestavaro says:

    What if customer.profession change its value after sometime?
    Supposed we have monthly data for Sales. What if one customer is a doctor in Feb, then a pilot in October, for example?

    How to build data model for such that situation?

    Thank you.

    • Chandoo says:

      In such case, you need to make relationships based on two columns. This kind of feature is not supported in Excel. You can use Power Query to merge tables based on multiple columns and return a consolidated giant table to Excel for reporting.

  21. nestavaro says:

    Is it able in MS Access?
    I have never used access before.

  22. faisal says:

    thanks chandooo your article is very helpfull for troubling peoples' especially in office environment under boss pressure.

  23. Ron says:

    Here is an introduction to PowerPivot.

    The link above is broken

  24. Venkatesh says:

    Hi. This has really taken my interest.. I have huge data tables to work with...and I use vlookup to fetch certain data. I have different data in different sheets...

    Like customer sales (customer code, product code,qty, piece rate, total amount, branch code) data in one sheet
    Branch details in another (branch code, branch address, state , region)
    Customer Geographical Data in third sheet (region, region name)
    Product details in fourth sheet (product code, product description and related)

    Now I use a vlookup to get branch name, state and product name respectively into my main sheet.

    Now what I want is

    customer code, product code,qty, piece rate, total amount, branch code) data in one sheet, branch address, state , region, region name, product description

    Can't his be done thru data model... I tried but it's not working... Eitherway, I will gonthru thr session on e again and give a try... Any help, is appreciated. Thankyou

  25. Achyutanand Khuntia says:

    Dear All,

    i am striving to do reverse relationship in Power pivot ,

    example : -

    1 - Data sheet
    2. - Source data

    step to stops - import first data sheet in power piovt and then source data , made relationship with both sheet , after created relationship i am able to do put related formula in source data sheet only (=releted('Source data'[Amount]), if i go to put formula in data sheet , parameter of Source data are not visible ,

    could someone educate me how can i do , and utilize related formula in data sheet.

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