Excel University Blog

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Posts

Microsoft Copilot in Excel for CPAs: Practical Workflows + CPE

By Excel University | July 10, 2026 |

Microsoft Copilot in Excel is changing how accountants interact with spreadsheets — but for CPAs, the real question isn’t whether to use it, it’s how to use it effectively while still building the foundational Excel skills that AI cannot replace. Copilot can accelerate routine tasks like summarizing data, writing formulas, and generating charts, but it…

Month-End Close Checklist for Accountants (Excel Template + Workflow)

By Excel University | July 7, 2026 |

A month-end close checklist in Excel gives accountants a structured, repeatable system to track every task, deadline, and responsible party — reducing errors, missed steps, and last-minute scrambles. When built correctly, an Excel-based close checklist becomes one of the most practical tools in your accounting workflow. This guide walks through exactly how to build and…

Categorize Credit Card Charges with the COPILOT Function

By Jeff Lenning | July 7, 2026 |

Mapping credit card charges to GL accounts is one of those month-end tasks that is tedious enough once, and exponentially more painful every month after that. Raw credit card descriptions are cryptic, the volume is high, and the manual effort adds up fast. In this tutorial, we walk through three exercises that show how to…

Excel CPE Training for CPAs: Earn Credits While Learning Practical Skills

By Excel University | July 6, 2026 |

CPE Excel training for CPAs is one of the most efficient ways to fulfill continuing education requirements while building skills you’ll actually use at work. Unlike compliance-focused CPE that covers topics you may rarely apply, Excel training for accountants delivers immediate, practical value — helping you close the books faster, build more reliable reports, and…

Power Query for CPAs: Automate Your Month-End Processes

By Excel University | July 2, 2026 |

Power Query is one of the most valuable tools a CPA or accountant can learn in Excel — and it’s still underused in most accounting departments. With Power Query, you can automate the repetitive data cleanup and transformation work that consumes hours every month-end close, replacing manual steps with a repeatable, one-click process that runs…

Formula-Based Reports with SUMIFS in Excel

By Jeff Lenning | June 30, 2026 |

Pivot tables are great, but they do not always produce the exact report layout that corporate requires. When the format is locked in and a pivot table simply will not fit, we turn to formulas. In this tutorial, we walk through three exercises that show how to use the SUMIFS function to build formula-based reports…

Power Query, PivotTable, and Pivot Chart: A Month-End Workflow

By Jeff Lenning | June 23, 2026 |

Month-end reporting often means the same tasks, repeated every single month. We pull data from a CSV, clean it up, build a summary, and maybe add a chart. If we are doing all of that manually, we are leaving a lot of time on the table. In this tutorial, we cover a three-exercise workflow that…

How to Automatically Log QuickBooks Journal Entries into Excel Using Zapier

By Jeff Lenning | June 16, 2026 |

What if every new journal entry posted in QuickBooks Online landed in an Excel table automatically, no copy-paste required? In this tutorial we walk through exactly that workflow. We use Zapier to connect QuickBooks Online to an Excel workbook stored in OneDrive, loop through each journal entry line so it lands on its own row,…

Month-End Reconciliations with Power Query

By Jeff Lenning | June 9, 2026 |

Month-end reconciliations are a fact of life for anyone managing financial data. Whether we are comparing Shopify orders against QuickBooks invoices, matching a bank statement to a check register, or verifying inventory counts, the core task is always the same: take two lists and find what does not match. In this tutorial, we walk through…

FILTER with SEARCH

By Jeff Lenning | June 2, 2026 |

Mastering Excel FILTER: Advanced Filtering with Multiple Conditions and Partial Matches Excel’s FILTER function is a game-changer for dynamic data analysis. Not only does it allow us to extract data sets that meet specific criteria, but it also empowers us to layer multiple conditions using AND/OR logic and perform partial text matches with the SEARCH…