Wednesday, October 1, 2025
Here's how to add sources and uses of funds to your company's Balance Sheet in Excel to get a clearer picture of how the changes affect your cash flow.

Use this Excel ‘Cash Flow Balance Sheet’ to See Sources & Uses of Funds...

0
For most businesses, cash flow is more important than profits and losses. The reason is clear. A profitable company with negative cash flows may not...
To improve forecasting, you can use Excel charts to track how quickly new products, stores, sales people, and so on ramp up their performance compared with similar launches in the past.

Use Common-Age Excel Charts to Compare and Forecast Performance for the Same Number of...

0
In the early lives of new products or new stores, managers often are anxious to track and improve sales performance. To do so, it's...
Excel offers several ways to summarize data quickly and easily. Here are the most powerful and flexible approaches, which include using Excel array formulas.

The Most Powerful Ways to Summarize Excel Data for Reporting and Analysis

0
(Note: I wrote this before Microsoft introduced Excel Tables or SUMIFS. This post is scheduled for an update.) Excel users often need to summarize data...
Spreadsheet users in businesses have distributed management dashboard reports for more than 30 years. Here's an example from the early days of spreadsheets.

The First Spreadsheet Dashboard: Mini-Graph Reports in Lotus 1-2-3

0
This is the first dashboard report ever created with spreadsheets. I worked on this reporting technique in the early 1980s, then included this report...
Using the right Excel charts to display year-to-date variances can clarify budgets and spending problems. But using the wrong charts is a waste of time.

Show Useful Year-to-Date Variance Charts in Your Excel Dashboards

0
Many companies have a difficult time creating charts of spending variances. In fact, many companies rely on charts that are nearly useless for that...

Show Key Stats Automatically in Periodic Excel Reports

0
Each issue of Business Week magazine used to include several figures titled "The Stat". These figures emphasized key data related to the article on...
These Excel dashboards, inspired by long-running displays in business magazines, illustrate more ways to format your Excel reports.

Sample Excel Dashboard Reports from Forbes and Business Week

0
This mock-up is based on a format that Business Week used about thirty years ago. However, their report used a different color scheme. As...
Read a Text File with VBA in Excel, and Write the Text to a Spreadsheet

Read a Text File with VBA in Excel, and Write the Text to a...

0
"I need to write a text file into one row of my Excel spreadsheet, cell by cell, 20 characters at a time. It's urgent....
Your Return On Equity ratio is a key indicator of financial health. This report lets you show the components of that ratio in a unique Excel display.

Map Your Financial Health With an Excel DuPont Dashboard

0
Management reporting is all about communication. Reporting Return On Equity (ROE) is a case in point. The ROE financial ratio is a key measure of...
Top-ten figures are useful because managers need to know where the greatest opportunities and the worst problems are. Here are ideas to make them readable.

How to Make Top-Ten Charts Easier to Read

0
Managers need to know where the greatest opportunities and the worst problems can be found. This is why top-item figures are so popular. These figures...

Latest Articles

Excel Flowbook Revolution

Getting Radical with Excel

It's time to think about Excel in a radical new way—when we use it to work with business or economic data. It's time, in fact,...
Growing too fast can be dangerous to your company's health. Use the Sustainable Growth Rate ratio to track your company's financial ability to grow.

How Fast Is Too Fast?

(Originally published in Inc Magazine.) What typically tops the list of worries of the chief executive officers of fast growing companies? Financing that growth, according...

How to Smooth Data by Using the TREND Function

0
Years ago, I read that Prof. William S. Cleveland had suggested that data could be smoothed by calculating a centered trendline through adjacent data—a...
Advertisement