Episode 150 | Excel Efficiency Tips For Accountants With Jeff Lenning

Many people often consider Microsoft Excel just as a simple tool to create tables, align columns, or generate reports. But if you can fully leverage all of its features and tools, you could achieve greater efficiency in your business processes. Michelle Weinstein welcomes Excel guru Jeff Lenning, Founder of Excel University, who guides accounting professionals in using this computer software to streamline workflows, improve accuracy, and automate repetitive tasks. He explains how making the most out of Excel’s many capabilities can lead to sustainable growth, better time management, and a healthier workplace culture. Do not miss this opportunity to unlock the hidden potential of Excel and transform your firm into a well-oiled, profit-generating machine.

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Listen to the podcast here

Episode 150 | Excel Efficiency Tips For Accountants With Jeff Lenning

Introduction

Welcome to the show. We have a very special guest and our special guest loves sharing anything in Excel, especially the things that help get work done faster in your firm. He built Excel University to help others excel in order to get their work done a lot faster. He teaches students all over the world how to use Excel more effectively through his live lessons, courses, books, articles, videos, webinars, blogs, and YouTube. His trainings show you different ways to make Excel possible to make your life simpler and more efficient.

Before we welcome our special guest to the show, if you’re an accounting, tax, or bookkeeping firm owner, and you crumble at the thought of your upcoming sales calls, you’re constantly worried that you’re going to go blank or come across pushy, I have a system for you. As the firm owner, I know that you have the paralyzing feeling of imposter syndrome.

Like you’re new to your niche and you’re just pretending to be an expert or you’re just unsure of yourself altogether being a firm owner. The frustrations of the sales calls are eating you up inside. You have your sales call with a prospect and then you’re only ghosted after the fact. Here at The Abundant Accountant, I show you a simple step-by-step sales process. You’ll never aimlessly wing anything again.

I will give you a blueprint and a formula for communicating your true value with confidence, even if accounting and taxes seem boring to talk about to your clients. Book your call with me at TheAbundantCall.com and I’ll show you exactly how to take back control of every sales conversation, close more clients with confidence, and end the second-guessing over your pricing for good. You will finally be able to stop trading hours for dollars and start growing your firm on your terms. Book your complimentary strategy call over at TheAbundantCall.com and stop procrastinating your potential. Now let’s welcome our special guest, Jeff Lenning to the show.

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Welcome, Jeff, to the show.

Thanks, Michelle. Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for being here. I am super excited to talk about Excel. I know every reader might be wondering, “Michelle, how would learning Excel better make my revenue go up, have higher pricing, and more profitability?” We’ll get into that today. Before we dive in, Jeff, if you could just share with everyone who you are and what it is that you do, even though I’ve already done your intro, I always think it’s better coming from you.

Jeff’s Journey With Excel

For me, it’s all about efficiency. I like getting the same amount of work done in less time. During my roles over the year as a CPA and as an accountant, I really learned how to delegate my manual tasks to Excel, rather than to other staff people, I delegated to Excel. I started teaching what I learned about how to delegate work to Excel through hundreds of in-person sessions, full day Excel classes, all over the U.S. Now that’s kind of evolved into online Excel training or a NASBA CPE provider. I teach these classes kind of directly. They’re in demand. They include like live office hours. That’s really where I really help people today is leverage the power of Excel to dial in their workbooks and overall improve efficiency.

I love Excel and I probably need to take your classes. One of my really good friends, Monique Marvez, she’s a standup comedian. This is how much I love Excel, Jeff, is that my nickname is spreadsheet. Like, she would call me a spreadsheet because I love analyzing data. I wish I knew how to do all the queries and all these things and take things from Zapier actually had someone build me.

I guess you could call like a sales dashboard where all our leads come in and I have everything in one place to view it. It’s all about efficiency. I bet I could even make this Excel spreadsheet more efficient, but I would need someone like your specialty. I’m very excited for our conversation and how people can level up their skills and Excel when I don’t think they think that that’s even possible to get more work done in less time and have more time for their clients and the other stuff they want to do instead of always relying on staff.

As we all know, it is hard to find really good people. Excel, it doesn’t talk back to you. Maybe if you put something in wrong. It’s not going to be entitled. It’s not going to ask for a pay raise. It’s not going to ask for vacation time. I’m super excited to have this conversation with you. Thank you so much for being here.

You’re welcome. I love talking about Excel and these other tools like Zapier you mentioned are also amazing. For me, the one tool that I focus on because it’s helped me and others save the most amount of time, for sure, has been Excel over the years.

Why don’t we start? How has Excel saved you so much time where you were able to get more work done in such less amount of time that you said, “I am going to go start teaching and training and giving CPEs out for this.” How does this work for an accounting firm owner, bookkeeping firm owner, fractional CFO firm owner, CPA, EA? Maybe they run the show by themselves or possibly they have themselves. A few other people on the team. They want to really cut down on the amount of time that they’re doing things and increase efficiency. How does this all work?

To answer your first party question is kind of like, what was my big a-ha moment?

Yes.

Where I saw the power of Excel. It was basically I was the accounting manager for a public company. I was tasked with, of course, doing the monthly close. I had all these reports, all these journal entries, like all this stuff. We had a great accounting system and ERP system. At the end of the day, a lot of this stuff just downloaded into Excel. I feel like that is true for a lot of accounts all over the place. We have systems like QuickBooks or whatever, but there’s just some stuff that it won’t handle or we need to create reports that come from two or more systems.

Excel kind of is that central area where kind of things kind of come together. For me, it was just generating all these P&Ls, all these monthly reports, and doing the monthly close. When I got there, that monthly close process was typically two weeks. By the time it was all said and done, I was generating reports for the monthly board meeting. I really started focusing on this kind of continuous improvement model.

I would look at my workbooks, and I would say, “How can I get this one thing done by Excel? I would just get the low-hanging fruit and this one report, this one journal entry, even just like this one cell, if I could automate it, then next month, I wouldn’t have to do that manually.” Over a couple of months of focusing on just automating one element of each of these workbooks, I gained kind of this efficiency snowball. I would take this extra time and I would reinvest it into automating a different workbook. I would take that time and invest it in automating another worksheet. Over the course of about maybe 12 or 16 months, somewhere in there, like it was dialed in.

Now no longer was our monthly closed for two weeks, it was closer to two days. I’m like, “Wow.” Excel is not like Microsoft Word with tables. It is deep. When you really know how to leverage it and how to use all the things together, it’s significant. That was really what launched into doing the training. I can go through all those evolutions of how the training worked but that was really the a-ha moment where I said, “This is so powerful.” I don’t think the average accountant is really leveraging Excel. I need to help people do what I did.

Like you said, it goes so deep. I think I need to sign up for your class. I’m not even an accountant, but I think this is just anything we can. I guess I’m just so curious. How did you teach yourself all this?

For me, let’s just call it like it is. If I were to say like, I’m lazy, it’s just a funny way to describe the fact that I really wanted to delegate everything to Excel that I possibly could. It’s not that I’m really actually lazy, but that’s the way I like to think about it. If I’m typing in two values into some cells, I’m like, “Could I get Excel to figure out the last day of the month so I don’t have to type in the last day of the month every time?”

That’s just a simple and kind of silly example, but it’s that mentality that caused me to just try to get Excel to do as many of the manual things that I was doing as possible. Surprisingly, it’s like this, it’s like, “I wonder if Excel can do this.” It could. “I wonder if Excel could do this?” It could. I kind of stopped thinking in terms of, “Can Excel do this?” More like, “How can I get Excel to do this?” Just assume that it could. In a lot of cases, that is true.

That’s so cool. What have you seen, like how would this work with a firm owner who might be running their own show or it’s a small team? What’s the first step that they need to do to say, instead of I need to hire somebody it’s like, how do they even think about the list of what to delegate to Excel?

Automating Repetitive Tasks With Excel

If I were to kind of separate all Excel workbooks into two kinds, then this is helpful. There are certain things that I only build once and I never update it again. There are those that I use every day, week, month, quarter, year. Those recurring kinds of workbooks, are our targets. Those are the ones we want to invest time into automating because those are going to give us the payback over time. That’s where I would start is identify the recurring use workbooks and focus on automating everything in there that you can.

Excel: Identify the recurring use of workbooks and focus on automating them.

What are some examples of what the reoccurring tasks are that they could delegate to Excel versus say, “I need to hire someone to do this.” If you were to brainstorm, pretend I owned a bookkeeping firm or fractional CFO firm, what are those tasks that a firm owner could say, “I need to create that because it’s a recurring workbook that you’re going to use multiple times, I’m going to invest X amount of hours into figuring this out because it will have the reoccurring use?”

I was working with a CPA firm, and he’s a CPA, and he has several staff people. When I got there, he was kind of like, “Jeff, my staff are like at max capacity. I don’t even try to advertise to get new clients, because we just don’t have the capacity to even service them and give them the quality of services that I would like to do. Those types of reports were taking downloads from his client’s accounting systems and then developing the monthly reporting package that he would then use in their board meetings and things like that.”

The package included the things that you would expect. It’s your P&Ls, your financials, there’s some charts, some analysis, recommendations, those types of things. He was like each one of these takes like a week per client to do. I just sat down with him and we looked at all of the things. It’s like, “Let’s download the trial balance in one worksheet. From that one trial balance, Excel automatically populates all of the financials. Let’s look at how do we create the graphs in an automated fashion. Download and everything, all the graphs are created with the refresh, and on and on you go.”

By the time we were done up leveling his staff skill sets, those one week per client were now down to like four hours, like a half day per client, because instead of rebuilding everything, it’s literally, we just update and refresh, and then all those workbooks and reports are updated. That really helped him save time. When someone quit, he didn’t have to rehire because he had the capacity. He was also able to bring on additional clients. That was a big win for him. Those are some examples.

When you look about this CPA, and he took the task from a one-week task down to a half-day task, if someone quit, he didn’t really care because he had created his own Excel employee within the firm. Now he was able to take on new clients. What I’m curious about from the sales side of things, because this is The Abundant Account podcast and all about making money, how much revenue was he able to actually bring in because he was no longer at capacity once he invested the time to create these systems and taking the downloads and reporting packages and investing the time into creating the Excel doing the work versus the employees doing the work.

The first kind of component to that is his billing model, which was not hourly. You had Ron Baker on your show. We’re not trading time for services. Those were fixed-fee projects. Any efficiency gains went right to his bottom line instead of reducing his fees. That’s how that worked.

Do you know how much more went to the bottom line?

I wish I had better internal statistics for him. That would be great but I don’t know the number of new clients he took on or sort of how his P&Ls looked. That was outside of the scope of what access of information that I had.

What have you typically seen from a lot of the clients that have gone through your trainings, have implemented your training, have created their own Excel employees than their firm where they didn’t need to hire and they realized, “That was a waste of payroll.” Not only that, like you said, because you’re not billing hourly and this is an app. This is the key ingredient to stop trading time for dollars because one week of getting the same end result in half a day is a significant savings. I mean, what’s that 40 hours to 8 hours as a savings of the difference? 40 hours to 4 hours.

It’s probably not unusual to do something in 20% of the time that it used to take. You’re eliminating 80% of the labor is not an uncommon result. I usually say half, but that’s just because I built in some buffer. The realistic nature is it’s much more than that.

Love it. I need this for my business. How else, Jeff, have you seen this really make a big impact? What would you say would be the next step for a firm owner to take on the scary step of learning Excel and saying, “I want to eliminate the task of creating this reporting package for my clients. I’m doing fractional CFO work, I’m meeting with them monthly, I need to create the P&L, the financials, the charts.” All these graphics and graphs. What would you say is the next step for someone who’s listening? Like I am overwhelmed, I’m at capacity, Jeff, did every firm owner’s at capacity and I cannot take on any new clients and I feel like I’m just spinning my wheels and working 60, 80 hour weeks.

Obviously, I’m biased, but I think my training is pretty good. I would say even before that, it’s kind of like getting everyone on the same page because the staff are going to have different Excel skills, different experience levels, and different capabilities. When I go to update a workbook, I might use an XLOOKUP function or a subtotal function. Maybe I go on vacation and so another staff person opens up my workbook for that client to update it. They’re like, “I don’t even know what this is, so I’m just going to rewrite Jeff’s formula to VLOOKUP because I understand that or I don’t really know what this subtotal function argument nine is, so I’m just going to go and revert that to some function.”

I come back and then I’m opening it up so I’m like, “Who broke my workbook?” Unless everyone’s on the same page, it’s very hard for people to like update all of the client’s workbooks. That’s one benefit of MyTraining. If you don’t like MyTraining, there are other trainers out there, of course. It’s that it gets everyone on the same page. When the firm staff go through the training at the same space, they’re going to understand which function we’re using and which circumstances, why, and how to update that and that creates this synergy firmwide.

If they don’t, obviously they have to learn this stuff and do training, because I’m not really sure. It’s almost like you started to speak a very Japanese-ish terminology. LOOkUP V or whatever you said and having these different workbooks. What would you say is the amount of time a firm owner would need to invest on the front end in order to see these efficiencies and be able to eliminate 80% of the labor, either they’re personally doing or their staff is doing on the training side? What have you seen?

I cannot speak for other trainers’ courses, but I’ll tell you how my courses are laid out, is that they’re laid out in a progression, lessons 101, 102, 201, and you go through in order. I intentionally start with what I’ll just call the low-hanging fruit, which is the features that are relatively easy to learn and can help you save the most time. When the staff go through lessons 101, 102, they’re already working more efficiently with just a few hours of training.

The training proceeds to work on more technical things that help you automate like all the non-low-hanging fruit like the things that are more complicated so converting input cells to formula cells and which functions we can use to do that. You’ll see benefits from the beginning and then as you proceed, it just kind of is this big snowball. That’s kind of how I organized all the features and functions that I teach in my class.

Can you give us some more examples of the features that they’ll learn in 101 to save more time on the front end from the low-hanging fruit where they’ll actually be implementing it at the same time to see the higher return on investment of time from the learning that might help a firm owner just like some basic things that aren’t too complex, but say, “I’m going to teach you X.” When you start to implement this across all of your clients that you’re doing a P&L for, you’re going to start to see that you’ll save X amount of hours.

My company is XL University. I try to use all these like collegiate and university kinds of structures. In freshman year, that’s the kind of the first sort of module. It goes to sophomore all the way through. In freshman year, the kinds of things that we cover are going to be tables and just the table’s function or feature, it’s a way to save a lot of time and make your workbooks more reliable. It’s something that’s super easy to learn. It takes like maybe 30 minutes to kind of get your head around all of the different capabilities of tables. Once you see tables, you’re like, “Wow.”

Excel: The Excel’s Tables function is a great way to save a lot of time and make your workbooks more reliable.

You can implement them across your workbooks. They’re going to be more efficient, more reliable. You take that extra time and then you roll it into learning. The next thing, which are going to be things like data validation to make sure everything’s consistent, the subtotal function so that your balance sheets actually foot all the time, and then you move into additional features and functions as you go through sophomore, junior. Junior year, we cover pivot tables, which is a big one. In the master’s lessons, we do things like Power Query and Power Pivot. They’re all designed in a progression in a really well-crafted sequence.

Even doing freshmen year, like you said, a way to save more time just on subtotaling functions of a balance sheet or anything like that on something that is an investment of just 30 minutes to learn. What else did you see as far as success like with the CPA firm that you had shared earlier as a real-life example for someone to put it into context?

These are going to be the kinds of reports that you’re delivering to clients over and over. If you focus on things like tax, maybe it’s that process where we download the trial balance and then we forget exactly how we classify those accounts into tax return line items. How do we ensure that’s done consistently year over year? How do we ensure that’s done as quickly as possible? In a lesson, I talk about mapping tables and how you develop this intermediate step of a mapping table and I show exactly how to do that. That way, year over year, you just drop in the trial balance and the mapping table creates those line items that you need for tax purposes in exactly the same way every year, instantly, virtually. That’s another example.

That’s a great example. I know before we even started talking, you were saying if you had to share with a firm owner, like how to delegate everything to Excel, their work to Excel. What is the first thing, and maybe you’ve already shared it but to become the most efficient firm owner that they could possibly be? What’s that like first thing they’re going to end and say, “I’m going to go listen to Jeff or I’m going to go just do this thing he’s telling me to do that would make the biggest dent in someone’s firm who is completely scared of Excel and overwhelmed from what they’re just listening to.”

There’s an Excel feature that I want to talk about here, but then there’s also this process that I developed that I kind of want to talk about here.

The feature first and the process second.

Power Query: The Game-Changer For Automation

The Excel feature that I would say if I had to like to recommend one and only one Excel feature to learn would help accountants generally work more efficiently. It was its power query and I have a ton of free Blog posts, I have a ton of free YouTube videos that can help you level up there. It’s also included in my courses, of course, but Power Query helps you get data from external sources in an automated fashion, and then clean it up and transform it so it’s ready to be used by the time it hits your Excel workbook. From a feature perspective, Power Query is what I would recommend to focus on first.

How is Power Query compare, and this might be a dumb question, but I know someone’s thinking it to AI and all the robots out there. How does what you teach so different than any of the AI that has come out?

The AI is great to help us with like a one-time kind of project. For example, “I need to clean up this list of names and I need to split it at the comma into first and last name.” You could drop that list in the chat GPT, and ask it to separate it for you and it’ll split it out. The difference in Power Query and using AI like that is that Power Query is designed for recurring use projects so that next period I just hit the refresh button. I don’t need to copy the list, paste it, develop a prompt, describe what I want it to do, and then copy and paste it back to Excel. This is in Excel, single refresh, done. It’s built for recurring use projects.

I get that that’s part of the theme of our conversation. It’s for things that you would need an employee to help you with. This is removing the burden of payroll and people wanting to take time off or the sense of entitlement, or you’re like, “They’re working from home, but it doesn’t seem like they’re really working. I wonder what they’re doing.” At least you know Excel is just doing what you tell it to do. Is there anything else that you can say as to what it eliminates on the employee side that you’ve seen from the firm owners that have provided you feedback on how it’s really helped them eliminate the headaches and the pains of trying to hire great people when they’re like, “I have Excel. I just needed to use the tool that I’ve already had on my computer for EONS.”

What it helps is it makes the work more fun and more challenging for talented employees. For example, I’m hiring someone to do the same, like grind this tedious routine manual task. They’ll do it, but it’s boring. It feels like a waste of time, and it is. What we equip our staff to do is single click refresh, and get their work done. Now they have the time to actually do value-added stuff for their clients. I can actually analyze this stuff. I have time to figure it out, think about it, and make suggestions to improve the business. It lets these employees bring more value to their clients because they’re not stuck doing stuff that computers are better doing anyway.

I think that’s a great way to look at it. Where have you complained in your firm of these boring, daunting, repetitive tasks? Where has a staff member employee complained about how boring their job is or how repetitive it is when the beauty of having a firm versus someone at In-N-Out Burger having to cut fries and burgers, they have to do the repetitive task all the time. They’re like against machinery, where in our firms, this is a piece basically of machinery that we just need to utilize that’s on our computers.

Correct. Exactly right. That’s the thing about Excel. It’s sitting right there anyway. We might as well use it.

I think you bring up a really great point. If they don’t have the staff, what are those areas that are daunting to think about doing that take 40 hours that you didn’t even know was possible to maybe do in four, if you invest that front-end time to get the output in a much quicker way so you can focus on the fun stuff, the analyzing? I always talk about it, Jeff, from a sales standpoint. Most firm owners want to do the work.

They want to get into the numbers, do the bookkeeping, do the resolution case, do the tax planning. First, you have to get the client. First, you have to get paid. In order to do that, you have to learn the art of enrollment and sales to do that otherwise you cannot do any of the work until you get paid and you have a signed engagement letter ready to go. It’s the same thing in just a different format of efficiency to bring more profitability to your bottom line.

That’s exactly right. Leveraging from that is this idea of the recurring projects and how do we systematically optimize those for speed and accuracy. I’d mentioned there were two things. The second one is my process called the speed loop. It is a process I developed when I was the accounting manager. It’s designed to be a formal way to focus on improving every recurrent use workbook for efficiency and accuracy. Students who go through my class are going to get access to that speed loop process. There are some template worksheets we install into every workbook that helps us focus on that. It really creates a formal way to continuously improve each of these workbooks over time to remove all the manual steps.

What is the speed loop look like if you were to talk about how you did it with that CPA firm owner? They go to your training, they’re going to learn this speed loop process and they’re going to have this formal way for efficiency. If you break it down into like fourth-grade level of English based how does that work for a firm of how that would look like and how it would be implemented?

What it looks like is there’s some sort of template worksheets you would install into each of the workbooks you want to optimize. The first one is really ranking the tasks by manual time. In other words, every week I have to copy-paste this trial balance into this worksheet. You’d put copy-paste five minutes. The next thing is I have to create this report and report fifteen minutes and you just literally catalog the relative time and the relative manual tasks.

You’re going to sort it by decreasing by time. You’re going to go through and then you’re going to automate that using skills that you learn in the course. In other words, I might not have the skills to eliminate the copy-paste step yet, but as I go through the training I will see how that skill helps me automate that step. First, we catalog the steps, and then as we learn the skills we’re able to eliminate those manual steps through Excel features and functions over time. That’s kind of the gist of it at a high level.

Very fascinating, I must say. Jeff, what else would you share with a firm owner that wants to create efficiencies, sees that they’re the bottleneck or they’re at capacity, they cannot take on any more clients, they knows they’re losing revenue, they are not enjoying their firm as much as they possibly could, if the remedial repetitive stuff was removed from their plate?

What else would you share with a firm owner that maybe we haven’t spoken about that would be very enlightening for them to know to take action on something like this instead of like their eyes are glossing over from everything you were just saying for the last half an hour, 40 minutes. We want the eyes to get really clear with a new lens to see that this investment of time and education will pay off a thousand percent on the ROI. What else would you love to share with a firm owner that their eyes might be glazing over? They might actually be taking a nap right now reading at this point.

I would say that I’ll talk about the benefits of it because that’s what I have lived and seen, but I really want to talk about to actually see how this could actually work in the actual real world for free. You can just head to ExcelUniversity.com/Tips. It’s ExcelUniversity.com/Tips. There is not only a way to opt into the Excel tips newsletter that I send out every week so you can actually learn these skills for free. There’s also a registration for a free class. If you’re a CPA, that’s great because it qualifies for two CPE credits. It’s a free class.

What it’s designed to do is to teach you sort of the minimum things that have the biggest impact. I cover things like tables. That’s free. I cover things like Power Query, and Pivot Tables. That way it’s really going to let you open your eyes and see, “I actually now can see there’s this depth to Excel.” When I really can leverage its power, it really has an impact on me in the real world rather than just like, “It’s just a way to format reports. It’s a way to align columns and numbers.” It’s bigger than that. This free course is really going to help you see that.

It’s the URL one more time.

ExcelUniversity.com/Tips.

Let’s say they don’t go there. They don’t want your free tips, okay? Just hypothetically saying. I think that would be a really bad idea, but just in case, is there anything within the Excel tutorial or Excel, I don’t know, I’m on a Mac so they call it application, that could help a firm owner if they’re just using it and just want to make, I don’t even know if it could make it more efficient without learning from you or someone like you and watching your YouTube channel, that you would say are a great way to learn something in Excel or even for someone like me. It’s not an account that says, “Here’s something you should learn and within Excel, they actually have really good features to teach yourself.”

Microsoft has actually been doing a really good job of what they call surfacing these features and functions. We’re going to see that continue but when you get this yellow little tooltip in the upper left corner or a green little triangle, don’t just dismiss it. Look at it, because it’s trying to communicate with you. Like, “Did you notice this or here’s a suggestion here.” The other thing is, of course, Google has been legendary for helping us learn specific things over the years.

Now that’s kind of being replaced by chat GPT because it’s just like direct to the point. I don’t have to sort through all these different blog posts. Those are good at learning one specific task. Like, “How do I use a lookup function to retrieve the amount?” It’s really good at helping you answer that one specific narrow question. Those are some great tools, but at the same time, it’s kind of not, and I’m here biased again, but it’s not like a course like mine, which is like, here’s things you’re not even aware of these things to even ask chat GPT. You’re not aware to ask Google about this.

You don’t know what you don’t know. You’re going to show ways on how to apply it to the accounting or tax or bookkeeping firm. Like real application, because you do this for accountants though.

Correct. We’re NASBA certified, so our classes qualify for CPE credit, so that’s really nice for CPAs.

Is there anything else, Jeff, that you’d love to share that maybe we have not talked about yet that is at the tip of your tongue that you want to make sure we all know about using Excel as a tool to make our time and our life much more efficient? Remove the IMAT capacity problem from a firm so they can increase their revenue and bring on new prospects and clients. Also, if you have a staff, make them happier by giving them the tools to have them do the repetitive work at increased speed and reduced amount of their time so they can actually do the fun part of their jobs that they enjoy. Like you said earlier, analyze the data. Is there anything else that you would love to share that maybe we just haven’t honed in on just yet?

Final Words Of Advice

That was an awesome summary, Michelle. The only other thing I would add is just that Excel is bigger than you think. There’s a lot of things that it can do. It’s not just like Microsoft Word with tables. It’s a big place. Give yourself some grace and some patience as you dig into it, because there’s a lot to learn. It’s not just, I can become a master at Excel in five minutes. Just give yourself some patience, pick away and hopefully you learn faster than the way I learned, which was decades of errors and mistakes. That’s what I would add there is just a big place.

Excel: Give yourself some grace and patience as you dig into Excel. You cannot master it in just five minutes.

I love it. For someone who’s mastered it to your level, since it took you decades of trial and error and mistakes. If someone commits to this all in, what’s the timeframe until they finish there. I guess in your course, do you have a PhD level? You go freshman year, sophomore, junior, senior, and then are they getting their MBAs in this?

I have the undergraduate lessons, which is basically the four core elements. There are two master’s classes. I haven’t worked on a PhD yet, but I actually have some ideas for some additional new courses this fall. I’m excited to get heads down and work on that. Anyways, it’s a big place and so there’s a lot that it can do to be helpful for accountants all over.

I think a PhD course, if you don’t have that in the category, that would be cool. You got your undergrad, your master’s, and now for those who want to be like you, they can go do the PhD classes. Jeff, thank you so much for being here with us on the show. It was such an honor to be here. At this point, I wish I owned an accounting firm just to learn all this from you, but it would not make sense for my business. I’ll have to go some other route, but it’s very cool.

Thanks so much for having me. This was a great conversation.

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Thank you all so much for joining Jeff and I on another amazing episode here at the show. I absolutely love talking about Excel and wish he taught me or could teach me everything to make even our business more efficient. Having our dashboard that was done in Excel has been a complete game changer to our firm. Make sure to check out Jeff’s trainings, his blogs, and his YouTubes. If you’re a firm owner and you want to stop trading time for dollars, use Excel but you also have to let go of those overly demanding clients and finally get paid based on your value and worth. Here’s what I’ve got for you.

At The Abundant Accountant, I show you a system on how to fill your firm only with ideal clients who value your time. You can take your firm to the next level and you get to work the hours that you want to work while still having plenty of free time every single week for yourself and your family. Not only that, I’m also going to show you how to do all of this in a way that feels simple effortless, and automatic.

If you want me to show you exactly how to do this, head on over to TheAbundantCall.com and book a call with me and my team to see exactly what you need to do in your firm to take it to the next level so you can only work with your ideal clients and have more time for yourself. Once again, TheAbundantCall.com. Thank you so much for being here and we’ll see you in the next episode.

Important Links

• Jeff Lenning on LinkedIn
• Excel University Online Excel Training
• Excel Univerity Blogs
• Jeff Lenning on YouTube
• The Abundant Call
• The Abundant Accountant

About Jeff Lenning

Jeff Lenning, CPA, built Excel University to help others learn Excel in order to get their work done faster.

At Excel University, he teaches students all over the world how to use Excel more effectively.

Through his live sessions, courses, books, articles, videos, webinars, and blog, he provides training in as many different ways as possible in order to reach as many people as possible.

He says, “It is awesome that we have the technology that enables such training.”

He hopes the things you learn at Excel University will be helpful.