Excel for accounting

What the job actually asks for

The month-end close is a sequence of comparisons — ledger against bank, subledger against control account, this period against last. Most of it is lookups and conditional sums over data that arrives inconsistently formatted, with trailing spaces and numbers stored as text.

The recurring tasks

• Match transactions across two ledgers
• Age accounts receivable by invoice date
• Summarise expenses by account code
• Flag entries that fall outside policy

Where people get caught

Values that look identical but will not match, because one side has a trailing space or a number stored as text. A lookup returns #N/A and the instinct is to blame the formula rather than the data.

What interviews test

Aging receivables by invoice date, summing by account code with more than one condition, and spotting why two apparently identical values fail to match.