Why to Use Review Templates in Excel
Setting up files so that they are easy to review can make a huge difference in the quality of the files you work with. Your colleagues and reviewers will also appreciate being able to quickly navigate your files, find what they need, and move on to other things. Reviewing P&L (profit and loss) reports is a very common task for most businesses, so finding a way to do this effectively and efficiently can have a dramatic impact on crucial business decisions.
How to Use Review Templates in Excel
Good review templates generally have some key components:
- A Table of Contents listing all the sheets in the file is very useful, especially if there are 10+ sheets in the file (or more tabs than you can see at once at the bottom of the winidow).
- Detailed review steps – this sets the expectations of reviewers and gives them a checklist to follow.
- Different hierarchal levels of reports can be helpful if different reviewer types will be using the file. For example, the executive team may look at very high-level results – consolidated, brand/division level, or region level. Market leaders may want to look at area or market-level results. Individual unit leaders should probably focus on their own unit, but sometimes it’s helpful to share the results for other units to give them comparability.
- Variances and trends – results are often only helpful when taken in context and against benchmarks. Adding variances to prior sequential periods, prior year periods, or budgets help show results in context. Trends can help even more, especially when a comparable period had some external noise, such as erratic weather.
- Comparability summaries – when you can see the results of all units/divisions together, you can see patterns that you might not see when looking the results for just one unit, or units in the aggregate. In the video below, the Side-by-side and Row-by-row sheets are great examples of this.
- Source Data sheets – obviously you need some source data sheets to start with. Make sure to add some helpful formatting to make those easy to read, as they are often exported with raw, ugly formats by default.
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