The Role of Excel in Managing Customer Accounts

Businesses are not run by skill alone; you also needs good management. One of the essential elements in running a successful business is managing the inflow and outflow of numbers concerning customer accounts, cash flow details, etc.

With the help of Excel you can quite easily manage much of the customer account and cash flow transactions. With a little programming knowledge, or some familiarity with macros, Excel allows simple automation of regular tasks. With Excel's help, the creation of basic invoices can be fairly easy to do. All you have to do is select a format for creating the invoice and then you can create as many copies as you want of it. Apart from invoicing there are a lot of other benefits of using Excel in managing the customer accounts.

Benefits of Using Excel

• By searching on Google you can find many free Excel templates for common office items like invoices, credit notes and purchase orders. Using these templates, all you have to do is fill in the blanks at the required places and your invoice or bill is ready to be sent to a customer.
• Excel allows the company to define the appearance of the spreadsheet with respect to fonts, character attributes and cell appearance. Apart from creating invoice, Excel also helps in the calculation of the invoice amount.
• With the help of Excel’s Active Template Technology, small businesses can manage their customers, products, payments and invoices with quite an ease.
• Excel provides the company with comprehensive data for reporting, formatting, analyzing and calculation. Excel helps a company in making sales report.
• When Excel is combined with backend database; it provides the company with a highly customized invoicing solution.
• With the help of Excel a company can estimate a purchase order creation.Excel helps a company in managing its fund more effectively while it grows bigger.
  

But while, Excel is very useful in managing customer accounts it does have a few limits.


Limitations of Excel

• Role of Professionals: Many companies selling hybrid Excel software claim that anyone without proper training can use it to generate sales reports. But, in reality it is difficult to produce a sales report without a proper programming knowledge or, at least, in-depth knowledge of Excel macros. Aside from that, a sales report produced by a non-accountant will not provide all appropriate information. Hence, one must not replace professionals with Excel.
• Competitive Comparison: Excel is often used to carry out analysis of pricing and products. However, it should be noted that Excel is not designed specifically for this task.
• Pricing Analysis: Excel is not ordered around the complex nature of the pricing environment. Therefore, performing an analysis is quite a task using the Excel software.

Thus, we see that though Excel gives us quite a few advantages in managing customer account, still they are no substitute for real professionals. Hence one should assign specific role to Excel in their company keeping in mind its various advantages and disadvantages.