Tax season just ended, and you probably filed your return with either the CRA or the IRS. So now what?
Even though you may be taking a deep sigh of relief that it’s over, don’t be too quick to celebrate. There are still a few things you can do to ensure that next year goes a bit more smoothly.
Here are 3 things you’ll want to keep in mind after you file your taxes.
Working with MS Excel is hard enough as it is with one worksheet. But when you work with more than one, the difficulty in dealing with that data increases tenfold with every single worksheet you add on.
To help, here are a few basic tips, handy tricks and informative tutorials to make working with multiple worksheets in Excel ten times easier for you.
A simple tip to start—customizing your view. It can be easy to lose track of which sheet you’re working on, especially when you have several worksheets to deal with. To put your worksheets front and center,
a) Open your workbook in Excel.
b) Click on the New Window button for every worksheet you want to view in that workbook.
c) In each new window, click on the tab of the worksheet you want to view.
d) Once the worksheets are displayed, click on the Arrange All button in the View window
e) In the following dialog, select your arrangement view. Ensure that you put a check in the Windows of active workbook option.
From there, you’ll be able to get a bird’s eye view of every worksheet in the workbook you need.
This is another simple tip that may go unnoticed. Because the scrollbar at the bottom hogs all the space at the bottom of your window, the number of worksheet tabs you can see is limited. An annoyance when you have more than 3 worksheets.
To view more, simply hover over the 3 dots at the left of the scrollbar. Then click and drag it to the right. You’ll instantly start seeing more of your worksheet tabs displayed.
In Excel, working with your worksheets as a single group is a quicker way for applying formulas and formatting across worksheets with the same formatting. For instance, let’s say you need to change your monthly rent costs and regular bills. If you’re moving in September and need to update your budget worksheets, grouping them together will let you input the data once to update the entire group.
a) Click on the first worksheet tab you wish to edit.
b) Then Click + CTRL (for non-adjacent worksheet tabs) or Click + Shift (for adjacent worksheets) on the other worksheet tabs to add it to the group.
c) Modify the cell as needed. Click on enter.
To ungroup your worksheets, you can right click and select Ungroup Sheets option. This may seem like a basic tip, but it’s a powerful one to have!
One handy tip for working with data across worksheets is to copy formulas that call for repetitive calculations. We’ve covered this tip before in our post, Work With Excel Data Like A Pro With 9 Simple Tips, but is a great tip worth mentioning again:
a) With the worksheet containing the formula you wish to copy opened, CTRL + clickon the tab of the worksheet you want to copy it into.
b) Click on or navigate to the cell with the formula or data you need (in the opened worksheet).
c) Press F2to activate the cell.
d) Press Enter. This will re-enter the formula or data, and it will also enter it into the same corresponding cell in the other selected worksheet as well.
Despite what you may think, data in multiple worksheets can be more efficient. When you need to add cell values from different worksheets, it’s possible to create and use a formula that can pull data from other worksheets that are in the same workbook and formatted similarly.
This tutorial from ExcelFormulas gives you a solid easy-to-understand explanation of how this trick can make your task easier. It goes the extra mile and even shows you how the same methods can be applied to multiple workbooks, as well.
If you need to combine data from different worksheets, this tutorial from Tuts+ Computer Skills will show you step-by-step how to combine your data from multiple sheets into one pivot table.
This is perfect if you’re keeping track of different types of information that are related but are separated in individual worksheets. You can dynamically connect them into one single worksheet so you can update them all at once. Note that this tutorial uses Excel 2013, but is virtually the same for Excel 2016.
This following trick from ExcellsFun is a bit more advanced, but helpful for getting your Excel data from different worksheets and workbooks into an individual worksheet using PowerQuery.
Using the example of track sheets being used to analyze sales rep performance, this tutorial also links out to a resource where you can access those practice files for a good hands on learning experience to master this skill.
What tips do you have for working with multiple Excel worksheets?
Every business has to face at least one tricky challenge in common: to keep its books organized. That might seem like an easy task if you are an accountant or a bookkeeper, but that’s not always the case.
The vast majority of small business owners end up having to organize the financial/documental part of the business by themselves to save some money or just to keep a close eye on them. Organization is a crucial part for every business’ success, and here are some valuable ways to start improving your operations today.
The first action you can take to integrate and organize your company’s books is to digitalize every single piece of document you might have. That’s right, even that small parking receipt from two months ago or that hotel bill that you paid during the last conference you attended–digitalize it! Documents that are stored in digital format (e.g., PDF, Docx, XLS) are much easier to handle and to access, which can be a huge time-saver. Or if you want to customize and convert the format of the documents you are storing you can use simple and extremely efficient tools such as Able2Extract to get the job done for you.
Also on the same line of digitalizing documents, a crucial measure to increase your books data security is to upload it to the cloud. This allows companies to store all the information they need in the cloud, which means that the data will be saved in external servers that can be accessed from anywhere at any time. Plus, some cloud service providers such as Welcome Networks presents the users with military-grade security for Virtual Desktops so they can have peace of mind about any hacking attempts.
Another highly necessary and important point to optimize books is to utilize online accounting software instead of the old fashioned offline desktop systems. Since these web-based applications allow you to send invoices, pay bills, do bank reconciliations, and to obtain reports of the most variables types, these web apps operate in the cloud and are the latest trend in the market.
An excellent example is SlickPie cloud accounting, a free software that even offers a source file attachment feature for companies to upload financial documents that are related to their transactions directly to their accounts, which can also be used in combination with Able2Extract to generate double the optimization value.
These software programs will drastically improve your business overall productivity since it will basically show you a financial x-ray of all your transactions through cash flow statements, balance sheets, and all other pertinent records registered in the system. And the best part is – it will all be just one click away to be accessed from any desktop or mobile device.
All these solutions need to be integrated and applied to increase the effectiveness in the company’s books. This will strengthen the business with top trend tactics that are being used by the main players in every industry, and it will grant your company with advantage points over your competitors’ procedures.
By putting these practices into action, your company will save time, money, and it will be much more secure to provide any financial documents whenever they are needed, regardless of environmental conditions.
If you were still waiting for the right time to come to embrace digital innovations to fully optimize your company’s books, now is the time!
For any financial services company, a client’s financial data is at the heart of its operations. As such, it becomes crucial for them to invest in a document management system and all the tools and processes it entails.
Underscoring this fact, CPA Practice Advisor outlines a number of pros and cons for having a paperless office with a document management system in place. As expected, the benefits presented by the pros outweigh, by far, the struggles imposed by the cons.
A document management system can drastically improve the workflow for accounting firms and clients alike.
For one thing, it saves business costs on paperwork. Businesses and customers can reduce paper dependency, ultimately making documentation, transactions and records easily accessible online.
For another, it allows companies to automatically create an electronic audit trail that can keep documents accurate and in compliance with industry standards. Document workflows can be set up and incorporated into daily processes, making routine procedures easy for accountants.
However, one important caveat to keep in mind is that simply having a document management system in place doesn’t mean your workflow is fool-proof. Depending on the dynamics of your clientele and your document processing routine, your needs can shift and change from day to day. In fact, companies that incorporate document management systems can still struggle.
Momentum, a renowned financial and credit services company, is one such example. They keenly felt the affects of a document management system that quickly became inadequate. “Our working volumes grew exponentially and then came to a point where the manual process no longer made any sense,” Riaan Verbeek, CFO of Momentum explains.
As one of the leading services in the area of financial advising, insurance, investment and health, Momentum had client data already digitized in the PDF format. But there was a weakness in their document management system.
The company quickly found that they needed a dedicated PDF to Excel converter in order to improve, complete and streamline their document management system. They needed to efficiently extract the vast amounts of PDF data to Excel and handle the data generated by the accounting department, as well.
With this in mind, the company added Able2Extract to their document management system to fill that need. A case study on Momentum shows that the company’s workflow did nothing but improve from the addition. You can read the full Momentum case study here. Successful highlights from the case study include:
By making an adjustment in one troublesome area in their document management system, Momentum was able to start processing and handling their client data more effectively.
Implementing a document management system can do wonders for the productivity of accounting firms. But that system must be flexible enough to change with your daily activity and routine.
If your firm has a system already set up, make sure it has a tool for every step in the process. Tailor the workflow and make adjustments as needed. If the addition of one PDF converter can improve Momentum’s metrics, think of what it can do for your firm.
Audits, tax payments, confusing forms—just three reasons why everyone hates tax season. And though you don’t need another, you can probably think of a few more yourself. It’s hard to feel anything but dread this time of year.
So you do what you can to make things easier and cheaper. But even that has its drawbacks. For instance, if you decide to cut out the accountant and the fees, you may have to do some major research to properly file a tax return on your own.
That being said, if you aren’t too tax savvy, finding answers to your questions will be the real challenge. Of course, there is the IRS website for official directions and answers, which should be on the top of your list. Yet if you need some clarification or insight, what sources do you turn to at the 11th hour?
Try and see if a few of the following sites can help boil down the essentials for you. They come well-stocked with helpful, easy-to-read articles and credible writers that have extensive experience and knowledge in the field.
The Tax Tips section of the H&R Block blog covers some of the most common topics including filing status, tax deductions, and tax refunds. This blog makes sure that you have the answers to all the basic questions on filing.
As you may know, Intuit has been providing small businesses, accountants and individuals with tax preparation tools like QuickBooks. Fortunately, the accountants that use the software are highly active in helping their clients and each other with tax questions on both the blog and the online Intuit Accountants community. Sift through them with a few keywords and you’re likely to find a thread or post that can point you in the right direction.
The TurboTax blog is also another good starting point for tax tips. If you’re a TurboTax user, you might be going through this blog already. Topics you can find posts on include deductions, 401K, incomes and investments, home, education and a few more categories that can generate some of the most commonly asked tax questions.
Because instructions and policies on filing taxes can be really confusing, a good idea is to start at the beginning. The About.com Tax section is filled with basic (and intermediate) tips for individuals, articles for business professionals, and even advice for tax preparers. There’s a good list of Tax Planning categories to explore, so you’re bound to find the answers you need.
Unlike most of us, Kelly Pillips Erb, tax attorney and tax writer/blogger is enthusiastic about taxes—and it shows! Her blog, TaxGirl.com, and column on Forbes.com are both all about explaining and discussing tax issues as well as covering news in the industry. Her insights and articles provide a lot of perspective that can help you make well-informed tax-filing decisions.
eSmartTax.com is the online division of Liberty Tax Service, a US-based tax preparation service. The site and content are easily accessible and provide you with tax related topics, discussions and resources. The main Liberty Tax Service site itself contains a good section on tax resources and posts on their Tax Lounge blog you can go through.
It was hard to pick one single blog from this roster, so we give you the full list. Like the Intuit Accountants community, AccountingWeb.com is a good starting point for those needing the perspective of an accountant. All writers have their credentials and fields of expertise listed, so you can determine which professional might have the answers you need.
This one makes the list for its authoritative value. Made up of experts with years of experience in tax, budget, and social policy, Tax Policy Center is focused on bringing you information on the policies behind the taxes you file. With an official library of publications, a dedicated blog, and sections devoted to Tax Facts and Tax Topics, this site is hands down a must-visit resource.
Remember that these sites only provide you with extra information, not legal financial advice on preparing your taxes. Thus, while you may feel some anxiety about filing taxes on your own, it doesn’t mean you have to go into it unprepared.
This was a very short list for such a complex topic. If we missed one which you think should be on here, let us know by adding your own go-to resources in the comments!