10 Excel Hacks For Retail, Restaurant, and Multi-Unit Companies

Prepaid expenses can be tedious for multi-unit companies because there can be a lot of them, and a retail-style calendar can make them tricky to calculate.

This hack can take a list of transactions and calculate the amortization, a roll-forward style reconciliation, and the amortization journal entry all in one bulk step. Use it as a standalone rec or import it to software like BlackLine.

The more locations your company operates, the more data you’re probably looking at and reports you’re running. And forms you’re filling out. And web-based processes you’re managing.

This hack can automate those steps! Just tell it what you want to do (click, fill-in, extract, etc.) and what website item (link, text, input, etc.) you want to interact with, and it will perform them for you!

Here are four examples I use it for:
1. Filling out an expense report – 30 clicks done in one step (I just fill in the month-end date!).
2. Running P&L reports for 10 different locations – 120 clicks in one step (I just fill out the report date)!
3. Setting up a software demo instance – 800 clicks in one step!
4. Posting content like this on LinkedIn and Facebook – 10-20 clicks in one step!

The more locations your company operates, the more people you’re probably sending messages to. Often those messages are quite repetitive – they have a similar audience, similar subject, similar body, and similar attached files, likely just different content for a different time period.

This hack can automate those steps! Leverage Excel to store your list of all the messages to send. Link the subject, message, and attachments to inputs like the date. Link the recipients to a lookup list of the current team roster (it tends to change a bit). Then let Excel draft and send the emails all in one bulk step! You’ll save a ton of time and reduce the risk of forgetting something or sending the wrong data to the wrong people.

The more locations your company operates, the more sheets your Excel files probably have, whether there’s a sheet for each location or just some of them. Applying updates to sheets – even things as simple as renaming them – can be extremely time-consuming.

This hack can automate those steps! Leverage Excel to apply those updates – renaming, reordering, zooming, freeze panes, show/hide, etc. – in one bulk step. Best of all, you can save the settings to use again later. This works really well with other macros that help with navigation and working with a lot of sheets.

You probably save a lot of Excel files to PDF before sharing them, especially if you share with people who don’t use Excel. The more PDF files you create, the more time that takes.

This hack can automate the save-as-PDF process for one PDF or hundreds! Save one sheet per PDF file or multiple. Then reuse that effort over and over if you save them every week, month, etc. by linking the file paths/names to date or other input cells. This works really well with other macros that can automate the email process as well.

You probably work with a lot of files. You may not remember exactly where you saved them or what you named them. You’re not the only one – McKinsey found in a research project that the average person spends 432 hours a year looking for information! That’s crazy!

This hack can help you dramatically cut that down. It uses an autofill search box to show you files/file paths that match your search. With just a few characters, you can find almost any file in seconds. It will wow your friends and your boss, and save you valuable brainpower!

The more locations your company has, the more data you probably sift through, which means a lot of filtering and sorting. You probably download the same reports over and over and apply the same filter and sort settings. Filtering and sorting in Excel are great – but it’s a lot of clicks to get it just right.

This hack can save you a lot of time by offering a multitude of shortcuts for common filter actions – filtering to selected values, blanks, zeroes, date ranges, numbers, fill colors, unfiltering, but the best option for repetitive filtering is saving your favorites to apply them in one step. It can easily apply 20-30 clicks in one shortcut. It’s like saving your favorite meal in a restaurant app – with all the modifications!

Tweaking formats is one of the things you probably do a lot in Excel. Whether it’s colors, or number formats, or borders, or fonts, Excel offers a lot of great formatting options. But using the mouse to apply them over and over can be a frustrating experience since many buttons are so small and some settings are buried deep in the menus.

This hack lets you toggle formats with ease, by cycling through your five favorite formats with one keyboard shortcut! The two I use most often are fill colors and number formats. I recently timed myself, and using the keyboard shortcuts for these was over 3X faster than using the mouse. That may only save a couple of seconds each time you run it, but that adds up to hours over the course of a year.

I used PowerPoint quite a bit alongside Excel when I crafted financial presentations. We updated 150 slides each month that had a combination of data tables, charts, and labels. There was so much data that it took a solid 3 days to update. Resizing and positioning items in PowerPoint is probably the biggest painpoint.

This hack lets you update those slide contents in one bulk step. Just list out the items you want to change in each slide and where they come from in Excel, and the macro goes to town, essentially performing a giant copy/paste exercise. That 3 days went down to 15 minutes. It allowed us to spend a lot more time analyzing the data, crafting the story, and accommodate significant last-minute changes. It even gave us a reason to use PowerPoint more, and it probably can for you too!