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Every business needs a reliable way to track income, expenses, cash flow, and financial obligations. That’s why many teams start with an Excel accounting template: it gives them a structured way to organize financial information without building a spreadsheet from scratch.

But before you dive in, there are a few important things to know about accounting templates, spreadsheet-based bookkeeping, and when it may make sense to use a more flexible work platform.

In this article, we’ll explain what accounting templates are, how Excel accounting templates work, and how monday.com’s Accounting Template can help teams organize accounting-related workflows in one connected workspace.

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Key takeaways

• Excel accounting templates help small businesses organize income, expenses, cash flow, and financial statements without starting from scratch
• Common accounting templates include income statement templates, balance sheet templates, cash flow statement templates, managerial accounting templates, and cost accounting templates
• Excel can work well for basic bookkeeping, but manual updates, version control, and formula errors can become harder to manage as teams grow
• monday.com’s Accounting Template helps teams organize accounting-related workflows with customizable boards, dashboards, automations, and integrations
• monday.com’s AI Work Platform can support finance-adjacent workflows by connecting accounting tasks, approvals, documentation, and reporting in one shared workspace

What is an Excel accounting template?

Accounting is all about making sure you always have a clear view of your income, petty cash, cost management, cash book, tax obligations, debts, paychecks, and everything else money-related you could possibly think of.

But that can be pretty hard to keep track of, especially if you’re leading a small team and wearing many different hats at any given time. This is where an Excel accounting template can help.

An accounting template is a pre-built accounting statement that you can download and customize to suit your business needs. These templates are typically pre-populated or have a range of labeled columns, and then you simply fill in the blanks with your own financial information.

There are a number of free accounting templates for Excel and Google Sheets you can download and import onto your desktop or web app.

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Why use the Excel accounting template?

Excel accounting templates make bookkeeping easier by giving you a clear structure to follow. If you’re new at this, having a clearly labeled template that can show which values to place and where is a total lifesaver.

For example, let’s say you’re a software engineer managing a new start-up. You might know a whole lot about building apps, but next to nothing about how to fill out an income statement. That’s common, especially for founders and small teams managing finance tasks themselves.

Having an Excel accounting template to fall back on gives you some peace of mind in knowing you’re on the right track. A template will guide you in terms of all the fields and columns you have to include and what financial data you’ve got to keep tabs on.

If you’re looking for a more flexible and dynamic accounting template with less manual labor involved, we’ve got you covered. First, let’s talk about the different types of accounting templates.

What are some examples of Excel accounting templates?

Because spreadsheets are widely used in accounting, you can find a lot of Excel accounting templates and just about every Excel bookkeeping template you could ever want, depending on your needs.

For example, there’s a General Ledger Template for you to track any business expense, a Statement of Account Template, Credit Card Tracker Template, invoice templates, and more. These templates can help you keep track of your finances and ensure that your business is running smoothly.

Let’s talk about the different types of accounting templates.

Income statement templates

An income statement template is a pre-designed template to help you record and summarize all of your team’s net income, net sales, and expenses during a given period of time.

An income statement is also often referred to as a “profit and loss statement” or “statement of revenue and expense.” That means you might occasionally see an income statement template labeled as a profit and loss statement template or a statement of revenue and expense template, but it all amounts to the same thing.

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There are a number of downloadable income statement templates you can use to record your income information in Excel spreadsheets. They’re normally pretty basic and include a number of pre-labeled rows and columns identifying common expenses and revenue sources that apply to a lot of different business types.

The key benefit here is that these templates will serve as a great prompt in terms of all the expenses or income sources you might not have otherwise considered including in your statement.

Balance sheet templates

A balance sheet template is a pre-made accounting statement that looks at all of your company’s total assets and liabilities — as well as shareholder equity. Balance sheets are all about demonstrating the “book value” of your company. To figure out your book value, you need to list all your company’s assets, liabilities, and equity for a given reporting date. Balance sheet templates are useful because they include pre-loaded rows that spell out all the basic information you’ll need to include in your accounting statement.

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There are a number of pre-built balance sheet templates on Microsoft Office and other apps that include pre-configured formulas to find all your balance totals. This can save you valuable time because all you’ve got to do is drag and drop your financial data — the template does all the hard work.

Cash flow statement templates

Next, you’ve got cash flow statement templates. A cash flow statement gives you a breakdown of what your company’s cash balances look like for a given period. There are loads of cash flow templates available on Excel and a number of external sites that you can download for free.

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Cash flow statement templates are particularly useful for companies that are scaling up and need to show how sustainable their cash inflows are. For example, a clothing startup might use a cash flow statement template to quickly work out their cash balances over a 12-month period to show a lender that the startup can afford to take on a new business loan.

Managerial accounting templates

Managerial accounting is similar to financial accounting. But instead of looking at various accounting dates, it focuses on monthly or quarterly reports.

Managerial accounting statements enable you to analyze a company’s income and overheads to make important decisions about how your operations are funded and run. There are a number of managerial accounting templates on Excel — including budget templates and forecast templates.

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Why would you use a managerial accounting template? One of the key benefits is that these accounting templates tend to come with visualizations like graphs and tables that automatically change and update as you drop in your financial data.

This makes it easy to share with stakeholders and externals to let them know how your business is doing, without losing hours of precious time building tables yourself.

Cost accounting templates

Cost accounting templates are used to analyze spending and choose how your business prices its products or services. In other words, cost accounting can help businesses understand costs and set pricing more strategically. You’ll encounter quite a few cost accounting templates on Excel and other third-party sites, although these will often be labeled as “cost sheets” or “costing templates.”

A huge benefit of using cost accounting templates is that the cost data you’re inputting is often dependent on other variables. That means your data in one cell may go up or down based on the number you place into a different column — which can get complicated fast. Costing templates come with all those formulas pre-loaded so that you can create an accounting statement without creating a headache.

How monday.com’s AI Work Platform supports accounting workflows

Excel templates can help organize financial data, but accounting-related work often involves more than numbers in a spreadsheet. Teams may also need to review expenses, assign approvals, track recurring finance tasks, prepare reports, and keep stakeholders aligned.

monday.com’s AI Work Platform helps teams manage those workflows in one shared workspace. With customizable boards, dashboards, automations, integrations, and AI-powered capabilities, teams can connect accounting-related tasks to the people, deadlines, and updates that keep work moving.

The goal is not to replace dedicated accounting software, but to make the work around accounting easier to manage. monday.com can help teams coordinate finance tasks, automate reminders, centralize updates, and build dashboards that make accounting-related workflows easier to follow.

Our dynamic downloadable template comes with a range of pre-built financial reports — including all the basic accounting statements we’ve already talked about. That means rather than worrying about creating loads of new spreadsheets and organizing them all, you can make life simpler with one master template that has everything you need in one place.

Each column is fully customizable, and all you’ve got to do is drag and drop your company’s financials to create fast and reliable financial statements to support your accounting function. All of the formulas you’ll ever need are already integrated into the template, which means you can knock out all your accounting statements in record time without breaking a sweat.

You can download our free Excel accounting template here. But if you want to remove all of the manual processes involved in accounting with Excel, we’ve got an even better solution available in the form of our fully-loaded Work OS Accounting Template.

Why monday.com’s built-in Accounting Template is the only template you’ll ever need

It’s totally possible to run a company’s accounting function offline using Excel. Many companies do it. But if you want to be able to handle all the core accounting functions we’ve covered without working overtime, you may want to rethink Excel and check out monday.com’s Accounting Template.

With our easy-to-use Accounting Template, you can consolidate all the accounting information and workflows in your business to manage everything on a single dashboard. This empowers you with a bird’s-eye view of all your finances. You’ll be able to automate financial reports, keep track of spending, set up spending alerts, and you’ll always know where you are in relation to your budget and income streams. This makes performing financial audits a breeze.

And if you really love a particular Excel accounting template, you can even use it alongside monday.com’s more dynamic template. With the help of our set of handy integrations, you can easily import Excel workbooks onto your monday.com dashboard and use that data to contribute to your wider works on monday.com.

Not only will that save you valuable time, but it also keeps you organized. We’re pretty good at knowing which columns go where — which means that we’ll automatically turn your imported Excel workbooks into a clearly labeled and fully customizable monday.com board in just a few clicks.

You can then tag and move items, assign tasks to team members based on your imported accounting statements, and change your dashboard view to give you different perspectives on the financial data you’ve imported.

End result: your accounting management will go from slow and reactive to super proactive in a matter of minutes.

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AI-powered capabilities can also support accounting-related workflows by helping teams summarize updates, organize information, categorize requests, and surface items that may need attention. For example, teams can use monday sidekick, monday agents, monday vibe, AI columns, and the AI workflow builder to reduce manual work around approvals, reporting, and recurring finance tasks while keeping people in control of final decisions.

Even more accounting templates from monday.com

Financial Statements Template

If you’re focusing less on overall accounting and more on your financial statements, our Financial Statements Template will fit the bill.

You can use this template to manage capital investments, track debts and repayment schedules, and manage corporate audits — all while setting up rules and automations that will keep a running score of your core financial statements like your balance, income, and cash flow.

For example, you could set up an automation that automatically alerts a certain member of your team every time a capital investment posts a loss — or create an automated recurring task for your finance team to perform a monthly expenses audit.

Expense Tracking Template

Our Expense Tracking Template is designed to help you regain control of your finances with a fast and simple proactive approach.

This template offers live updates on all of your project or organization’s financials for any given period.

But it also gives you the chance to skip ahead and forecast where your existing financials will be in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

 

 

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The content in this article is provided for informational purposes only and, to the best of monday.com’s knowledge, the information provided in this article is accurate and up-to-date at the time of publication. That said, monday.com encourages readers to verify all information directly.