Financial Templates Save Time
What’s so good about financial templates? They save a lot of time! If you are an accounting professional, you surely respect your time, since time is the product you sell to your clients. Everything we do requires time. If I could save 10 minutes per day with financial templates, I’d jump at the opportunity! Every bit of time adds up and pretty soon you have saved enough time to accept a new client or offer a new service.
Imagine what you could do, if you saved an hour or more each day! Yes, financial templates are our helpers. You can use them for almost every repetitious task you perform for your clients, if you are an accounting professional. For example, when setting up a bank reconciliation file for a new client, you can reach for a bank reconciliation template. When a client needs a Balance Sheet for a lending institution, you can start with the Balance Sheet template. When somebody is looking for an example of a Business Plan presentation for his financials, all you need to do is get the business plan financial templates.
Sometimes, trying to save even more time, we can look for financial templates online to get started, but you may be often disappointed with what you find. Most financial templates do not seem to have been created by finance or accounting professionals, but rather by Excel experts. With Excel, just as with any other software, the developer needs to work very, very closely with the user (in this case the accountant or finance professional) for the software to be a success. If he doesn’t, the result is almost always less than satisfactory.
Since Excel is so commonly used by accounting professionals, many of them have become quite expert at it. In that case you have the perfect combination – the software expert and the template user in one. But unless that is the case, you may end up with a template that will be deficient in some basic way.
Also, unless financial templates have been designed and used in real-life business situations, they will always lack something. Fixing them is often just as time consuming, if not more, than creating them from scratch.
Many financial templates evolve over time as they are first created for one’s own use and then refined to accommodate more and more situations and variations. Again, if you are a professional and bill for your time, you need to keep track of time. And so, for example, a time sheet template is something you would use throughout the day, logging in the time worked on on different projects and customers. This time sheet template ought to be flexible enough to accommodate different rates per project and per client, to give plenty of space to document what you are spending your time on for billing purposes, etc. It also has to compute any interval of time, so you don’t need to worry about rounding anything to the nearest quarter of an hour.
It’s hard to even imagine having to start from ground zero every time one needed a financial statement, a sales invoice, a time sheet template, a break even analysis and many, many more financial spreadsheets.
Another benefit of working with financial templates is that they save your mental energy. When you have a spreadsheet that works well, you don’t need to even think of doublechecking your totals, changing the header, setting up the way the report will print, etc. A well-designed financial template frees you to focus on the substance of what you are doing, not the mechanics.
If you create your own financial templates, you have another advantage. Since you probably work with many clients, you can transfer the experience with client A to clients B and C, if it would be helpful to them as well. That’s another reason and another way in which professionally designed financial templates will have improved over time. And that’s why the best financial templates are those which are actually used on a daily basis by the person who creates them. It is only by using them that you can make sure they work error-free, you can finetune them and notice all possible ways to improve them.
I like to follow the principle of never having to do anything from the ground zero twice, but only once. And if you are an accountant or a finance professional, once you develop something like a form or a schedule, it becomes a template for next time.
For someone who is not a finance professional, financial templates have an added bonus. They supply a structure for the task at hand which that person might not be familiar with, if it weren’t for the template. For example, the template will guide them as to what financial data to enter into the form, be it a Profit & Loss Statement or a Cash Flow Forecast. The mere fact that the template has certain line items – like the cash balances, accounts receivable, fixed assets, liabilities, etc.on the Balance Sheet, for example, forces one to think in a well-organized fashion and gather the correct financial information according to the structure of the template.
One can say the same about a Business Plan.A good financial template can steer you away from making some fundamental errors. It isn’t unusual to see a self-prepared Business Plan in which some line items found on the Profit & Loss statement really belong on the Balance Sheet. With a professionally designed template, you wouldn’t make such a mistake.
So, next time you are about to embark on a financial project, find a professionally designed financial template first. And for those of you who have very unique needs when it comes to your financial templates, customization services are available as well.