What can i practice for a junior accountant role?

[aatt]

i have a junior finance accounts role which will be using excel,
but for this ledger role, what would be likely excel duties for a financial accounts ledger position?

the description says reconciliations, process ledger data, prepare month end financial accounts


so what specifically can i practice so i wont be too much of a novice when i start?
i was told vlookiups, pivot tables, and macros are helpful

does anyone know where i can find excel files with mass data to practice these functions?
do you expect much hand writing in the role? if so, how much/often?

 

[Fidget]

There's endless excel resources online, but you could have a look at this link to see if there's anything that might help you out:

Learn Excel Online From 40 Free Excel Tutorials & Reference Sites

I wouldn't worry too much about handwriting, or at least having to make any submissions in handwriting. The business world in general went computer crazy long ago and submitting something in handwriting would be rather quaint these days. This does mean though that you might have to brush up on your MS Word skills for producing reports etc.

Best of luck in your role - hope you enjoy!

 

[aatt]

thanks Fidget,
Yes ive watched many excel tutorials but this is with small amounts of data/table
i anticipate thousands of rows in the organisation (NHS)

I am going to practice VLOOKUP, MACROS and PIVOT TABLES but when working in ledger accounts, what can i practice in Excel to prepare me for the day-to-day duties of my role?
want would you expect me to be doing with the above formulas?

 

[Fidget]

You're probably better practising with a small set of data. That way it's easy to check that you've got it right, and once you've got the hang of it, then it doesn't matter if it's 100 rows or 10,000 rows you're working with.

I don't work for the NHS, so it's difficult to say exactly what you'd be using these for. Mind you, the NHS is publicly funded, so you can probably expect a heavy focus on budget monitoring.

 

[aatt]

I have learnt my daily tasks are:
Daily recon of bank statement &reports for the ledger
posting data to the mainframe system from the bank statement and reconciling on excel spreadsheet for the ledger
inputting data to the system for the ledger


So to prepare myself in advance, how would one perform these reconciliations?
I am told i will be using Excel Lookups, pivots and simple macros, but how can i specifically practice these functions in the tasks above?

Does anyone have sample excel workbooks i can practice these tasks/functions on?

thank you