The use of a spreadsheet program is widely used in everyday business activities. knowledge of spreadsheet use, such as Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, is an essential skill for new hires.

The use of Microsoft Excel as a business tool is valuable. Excel in business allows the company to manage business data efficiently and visualize and analyze data.

MS Excel is considered the easiest spreadsheet program to learn and the most important computer program to date because of its built-in analytics tool for businesses. How important is Excel in business is a question that will be addressed in this article. Keep reading to know more about it.

Why do businesses still use Microsoft Excel?

There are several alternatives to Microsoft Excel – SQL, R, and Python. These alternatives offer higher data storage space and can do advanced data analytics and data visualization than MS Excel.

Despite these powerful alternatives, many businesses still prefer to use Microsoft Excel mainly because it is easy to use and data analysis is easily accessible. Also, MS Excel is low-cost and beneficial for small and new businesses.

Excel spreadsheets are not only accessible, but they also offer powerful functionalities such as the creation of graphs and pivot tables.

Businesses use Excel spreadsheets mainly for storing, visualizing, and analyzing data. Excel skills are useful in the following business processes:

• Accounting and financial reporting
• Stock and supply chain management
• Tracking and inventory management
• Client management
• Project management
• Consumer data analysis
• Budgeting
• Invoicing

How important is it to have Excel Skills?

Excel skills are essential for business because this skill set is the foundation for several office-based works. It is advantageous for most office-based professionals today to have advanced and stronger excel skills that can greatly contribute to the company’s improvement.

Also, employees with Excel skills have a better chance of achieving promotion and leadership opportunities.

Who uses Excel in business?

Finance and Accounting Professionals

Accountants and finance teams prefer to use Excel because it can accommodate computations from basic to complex analytics. You can see them using Excel spreadsheets crunching numbers, summarizing financial results, and creating the company’s monthly or annual budget.

They use it for balance sheets and record specific business-related expenses and receipts. Excel can also be used to track bank transactions, client sales lists, and customer accounts.

Human Resources Personnel

Excel also performs human resources functions. They use Excel for organizing employee profiles and monitoring their working hours. This is helpful for the company to determine the composition of its employees.

Administrative Assistants

Excel is used by administrative assistants to perform minor bookkeeping, organize office documents, create reports, encode and update customer information, and monitor or maintain all records of the business.

Store Managers

Store managers are primarily tasked with maintaining the efficient operation of the business. They should be highly skilled in using Excel spreadsheets as this skill helps monitor their stocks and inventory.

They need Excel to help them analyze both customer and sales trends, set up the weekly, monthly, or annual budget, and schedule on-time payments to suppliers. Excel helps store managers work efficiently to maximize profits.

Business Analysts

A business analyst benefits from using Excel features. They use Excel to document the overall processes of the business. With their data collection, they can assess the general situation of the business.

They can pinpoint areas of the business that will generate maximum profit and areas that need improvement. Business analysts engage with large amounts of data regularly. Hence, they need analytical tools such as Excel to be productive.

5 Reasons Why Excel in Business Is Important

Summarizing and Analyzing Customer and Sales Data

All businesses gather data daily. They gather data on sales, website or social media traffic, transactional data, customer data, and much more. Companies summarize and analyze this valuable data.

Analysis of data is essential to improve overall business performance through sound decision-making. For example, you noticed increased traffic to your social media accounts through daily data collection. You may decide to dedicate a specific person to entertain all inquiries and accommodate potential sales through social media.

Marketing and Product Management

Marketers and product managers use Excel spreadsheets to list customer and sales targets. They also use spreadsheets to summarize both customer and product sales data.

Excel skills in marketing help you design and create charts and perform and compare product analysis. With Excel, you can interact with more customers through digital marketing campaigns.

Digital marketing is made easier with the help of professionally-made, free sheet templates. Check out Simplesheets.co for various business template bundles you can use for your business.

Stock and Inventory Management

Excel is an excellent and low-cost alternative program for stock and inventory management. You can create simple or complex stock management spreadsheets depending on your company’s specific needs.

You can integrate a barcode system into your Excel sheets to track inventory, delivery and purchase notes, monitor stock levels, and process products efficiently. The use of Excel in business helps keep operations running smoothly.

Creating Invoices and Tracking Deliveries

Business tasks such as creating invoices and tracking deliveries are important to keep business operations running. You can easily create invoices and track deliveries with Excel.

You can set up forms for new orders in Excel to facilitate faster product processing and monitoring dispatch from the point of sale. Your tracking spreadsheet can be integrated with the stock management department to merge essential business data for smooth operation.

Forecasting Future Marketing Strategies

Marketing strategists make major business decisions based on daily data collected. Forecasting helps businesses move forward by predicting trends and opportunities.

Forecasting also helps businesses set their budgets, make business policies, and set guidelines for hiring employees. An Excel spreadsheet has built-in tools that can make forecasting easier to accomplish.

Excel is highly customizable for your specific forecasting needs. You can maximize your use of this software by performing advanced forecasting and strategic functions.

Conclusion

Despite the many database systems businesses can use to improve their business processes, many still prefer Excel. Excel in business is still crucial even in today’s demanding business industry. Knowledge of Excel is still a fundamental requirement by companies for new hires.

If you are doubtful whether you should use Excel in business, don’t be. Excel is being used today because of the many benefits businesses can get from it.