Excel / Word templates for accounts production

Peter B

Am looking for an alternate to using sage for accounts production. Does anyone have an excel or word template which they use? If so woul I be able to obtain a copy?

Thanks,

Peter

probe

Why don't you make your own?

When I was FD of an international plc I created an Excel worksheet with the Income Statement (P&L in ancient Oirish), Balance Sheet, and all the notes to the accounts from the last annual report. Use one worksheet for each subsidiary. One or more worksheets for journal adjustments. List your journal entries with narratives on another sheet. Use Arial or Helvetica font for everything. (Never use serif fonts (such as Times Roman or Georgia) in tables or financial statements - a typographical/designer mortal sin!)

If you are meticulous and design conscious you can end up with a finished product that totally cross references in an Excel worksheet - which you can throw at the auditors (let em suck and see around it!). In my case they ended up re-keying the financial statements into a typesetting machine capable of "50 billion dpi resoution" for the sake of it, to create a tree-wasting annual report on 160 gsm paper.

Every company is different. You are probably better off starting from a greenfield site in excel or an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet - based on your last accounts format. Rather than trying to shoehorn your situation into someone else's system.

HeinekenTicket

You could design your own if your accounts in Excel/Word if they are simple and you don't expect them to ever become complicated. If you anticiapte you will scale up and accounts will become more complicated over time as a consequence, I would advise against the Excel/word approach to maintaining accounts. You would be inviting spreadsheet hell on yourself.

If Sage is not for you, have a look at the alternatives. I believe there's another thread that contains plenty of alternatives.

Peter B

I am actually working in an accountancy practice and we do use Sage. The problem is our datasets are in a mess and creating the accounts with it takes ages because you have to change the formatting etc. I was wondering if I could do the exact same with word using field codes and text switches. Then I could also integrate the automatic creating of the Engagement letter, bank letters directors certification etc. I could also have testing templates for each different part of the file.

The whole idea is to save time. With our audits we spend far too much time on jobs I reckon should / could be done automatically.

HeinekenTicket

If I read you correctly, you'd still use the Sage for transaction inputting but not for the report generating? If so, importing the data to Excel and then linking to pre-formatted reports is a possibility. I suggest you look into ODBC (open database connectivity). I believe it is part of the Sage feature set. I don't use Sage but use ODBC with Quickbooks for much the same purpose - easier manipulation and finalisation of final accounts. However, I suggest you start with a small and simple set of accounts. You know what you want the outcome to be but implementing it can be very time consuming (avoiding spreadsheet hell among other things).

I'd agree with the previous poster who suggested you develop your own templates, link them to Sage through ODBC and build the reports incrementally over time. You don't know what you'd get with someone else's templates. Test, test and test again as you build it - it's not a one-time piece of work. I realise you're not getting what you've asked for but hope this helps.

probe

One can't help but thinking that the last three postings were "sponsored" by sage.com directly or otherwise.... :-)

One has far greater flexibility using a spreadsheet in terms of finishing work. You need a general ledger system that can output a trial balance to a spreadsheet format file (eg xml, csv, even xls or xlsx format). It provides total flexibility in terms of generating the output you require and everything is cross-referenced to deliver the audit trail of adjustments.

There is a big gap between most accounting software and producing statutory financial accounts - even if they are not forming part of an annual report to be published.

If the companies you are preparing financial statements are part of a complex group www.sap.com is what you need.

Buchhaltungswerkzeuge. Vorsprung durch Technik!

HeinekenTicket

Probe, I have no interest, directly or indirectly, in sage or any other software. I'm just trying to help the guy with an issue and making suggestions within the context that I am familiar with.

Unless you have some evidence regarding your comment on 'sponsorship', perhaps you should just make your points on their own merits rather than denigrating the points of others, which are made in good faith.