Not beaming at the moment, but thanks for your interest. Goa must be a beautiful place to live.

My friend Kristina is willing to do customized spreadsheets for anyone who doesn’t have the time. All she will need is details of what you want to track and what you need highlighted. She’s an Excel whiz! Contact me through the site if you need something like this.

Is anyone still looking for help creating an Excel spreadsheet?
I am retired and live in Ontario, Canada but things like this can be done from a distance as long as one has all the information needed and the person needing help has the knowledge of how to attach files to emails.

I did the books for a few of my own businesses and also set up my daughter’s books (she’s a realtor) in Excel and found there wasn’t too much that a spreadsheet couldn’t handle. My accountant (and hers) has always pleased with the outcome and it never takes them more than a couple days to do our taxes.

Before computers and spreadsheets, accounting used to be done in extremely long, landscape oriented ledgers (that look amazingly like today’s spreadsheets LOL)

If you think about it, accounting software just takes data from spreadsheets (the data source) and presents it so the average person can understand what she/he is looking at. Accounting software just has all the formulas and forms pre-loaded to be user friendly.

A spreadsheet can serve just as well for years, if properly designed to accomodate a bit of growth and the end user has a basic understanding of how they (spreadsheets) work.

@Allena: I guess there are common things we all need to track

@Hope and Freelance Writing: I’ll check with the person who created it and see what can be done.

@Saul: I’ve heard of FreshBooks and it looks good. I haven’t tried it yet, though, because I need to track more than three clients in a trial, and I don’t want to manage things in two places.

@James: A spreadsheet is not a substitute for an accounting package, as you say, but it’s a good way to keep track day to day. Does QuickBooks work well for managing team tasks, or do you have a separate program for that?

@ Allena/Saul – That’s the problem – it would probably take you a while to figure out an Excel system that works for you, and it’s not going to give you what you want either from an accounting perspective. Spreadsheets weren’t designed to replace bookkeeping.

Plus, you’re still going to have to invest time and energy into preparing for taxes… why spend all that effort when you can get a proper small business accounting system and do it all?

But I will say, I’ve done some pretty neat stuff with Excel, and it’s familiar to many people, so I can’t knock it too much