Thank you for joining us today as we kick off our new blog, Practical Excel Accounting!
Each Monday we discuss in plain terms issues related to Accounting and Excel. We will have tips you can use as well as discussing issues relevant to Accounting and Excel. Join our mailing list to receive the weekly post by email. Sign up below!
Today we discuss keeping things simple. Many people think that in order to impress their boss, they have to come up with a complex solution to what they are working on. This takes a lot of energy all around. You will spend a lot of time and energy creating a complex solution. Simple solutions also take time initially. The difference comes once you have the solution.
When you are ready to present your complex solution, be prepared to spend extra time explaining it. Complex solutions often require a road map to help with navigation. When we are creating these solutions, we often keep that map in our head, requiring us to be available to explain it. In the short term, this can feed our ego. It can make us feel important to have to be in the room to present our solution. Don't fall into this trap, it is a shortsighted strategy. If you always have to be there, it means you can't be promoted. You have created a situation where you are not replaceable. When you are not replaceable, you will be locked in to your job and your present salary. You will be limited to the top of the pay range for your position.
Another issue related to that is the time that you won't be doing your other duties because you have to be present to explain your complex solution to everyone. You will be working late to keep up with your other job duties. This adds stress to you both at work and at home. You don't understand why your family gets upset because you have to work late. They don't seem to understand that you have important presentations that only you can make at work (a false sense of importance). After a while, you also wonder why you aren't getting promoted. After all, you are creating these incredibly complex solutions (that you may be the only one who understands fully).
Another issue we will address today is repeatability. The next time you need to generate this report, you will probably have to go through much of the creation process again figuring out exactly what you did to create this solution the first time. You have to go through your learning curve again. Also, because your solution is complex, you can't have someone else help you with it, even if you want (or need) them to. You are locked in to the solution as the only one who can do it. If you have to be away from work, no one can cover for you while you are gone. I have seen a situation where a staff member had to be away from work because of emergency. They were masters at creating complex solutions that looked nice when they were done. This particular solution was a report that needed to be prepared and presented while this staff member was gone. They hadn't done anything with the report before they left. In order to get the report out, the staff that was covering had to manually prepare the data for the report and enter the numbers by hand in a copy of the output page of the report. This worked out for the emergency, but created a lot of extra work that could have been avoided by using a simple spreadsheet solution instead of a complex one.
Keeping your solutions simple helps you greatly in the long run. You don't have to be there every time someone needs an explanation of your solution. Initially you may spend about the same amount of time creating both a simple and a complex solution. In the long run you have time to complete your job duties because what you have created is both easily understood and repeatable.
So remember to keep your solutions simple!