Excel - Business Accounting?

It won’t be that hard. Google “income statement templates” or “Balance Sheet Templates” – there are zillions of them on the Web. I found this one on Microsoft’s website – it took about 5 seconds to find.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/income-statement-TC001074461.aspx

You don’t need to start from scratch. Rather, look at the various templates, and make additions or subtractions based on the needs of the industry (or company) you are analyzing. But the templates have done most of the hard work for you.

You need to learn Excel, dude. Your school should have a resource that can help you learn quickly – a tutor, eg. But for the long-term, but a book like “learn excel in 24 hours” and get a thorough understanding. In the biz world, anyone who stumbles around Excel, looks incompetent.

You need to learn Excel. I used small business accounting packages, but when I wanted to create a decent looking report, I exported my data into Excel. There really was no substitute for the filtering and sorting functions when it came to sales reporting and creating cost accounting schedules.

How exactly do I export my data into Excel? I need a link to step-by-step instruction. I’ve got to get this now before I go further into my MPA! Please help! I don’t want to download a balance sheet, I need to know how to do a balance sheet!

I was using products like MYOB where we entered all our accounts and used it to pay our bills and create our invoices and reconciled our bank account against it. MYOB had a feature built in that made it possible to export the data into table form in Excel. Because the directors were used to Excel spreadsheets and didn’t like the format of the reports that MYOB created we found the flexibility of this very handy. You need some accounting courses. You will find the discipline and the ability to spot anomalies in budgets and expense reports very handy.
Perhaps these links will help.
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/FE/FE15300.pdf
http://community.freshbooks.com/support/what-is-a-balance-sheet/

Thank you so much cazzie! This really helped a lot. I’m in a master’s program of Public Administration, but I majored in Social Science and Psychology (BA). Never had to do business math and I’m only familiar with Excel for payroll. These links you’ve posted are awesome! Thanks again!