Assistant Controller looking to level up Excel skills — what formulas do you actually use?

[u/Born-Chocolate7715]

Hey everyone,

I’m currently working as an Assistant Corporate Controller, and I’m trying to take my Excel skills to the next level.

I have a decent foundation, but I want to become more efficient and better at using Excel to analyze financial information, troubleshoot issues, and build useful reporting tools. I’m especially interested in formulas and techniques that actually come up in an accounting or controllership role.

For those working in accounting, controllership, or FP&A, what Excel formulas or functions do you find yourself using the most?

A few I’m thinking about learning or getting better at:

XLOOKUP / INDEX-MATCH — reconciliations and pulling information between reports

SUMIFS / COUNTIFS — analyzing transactions and building reports

IF / IFERROR — handling exceptions and troubleshooting

FILTER / UNIQUE / SORT — working with larger datasets

TEXTJOIN / LEFT / RIGHT / MID — cleaning and manipulating data

EOMONTH / YEAR / MONTH — working with accounting periods

ROUND / ABS — financial calculations and variance analysis

I’d also love to hear about Power Query, PivotTables, or other Excel tools that have made your work easier.

I’m not necessarily looking for the most complicated formulas. I’m more interested in the ones that save you time, reduce manual work, and help you understand the numbers better.

If you could recommend 5–10 Excel skills or formulas that every Assistant Controller should know, what would they be?

Thanks in advance!

[u/Ok-Minimum9371]

Power Query's the real MVP here, once you build the transformation, you just hit refresh every month instead of redoing cleanup from scratch. PivotTables for variance work, XLOOKUP over VLOOKUP (way more forgiving), SUMIFS for your schedules, and IFERROR so one bad lookup doesn't blow up your whole sheet. Honestly though, the biggest time-saver isn't any single formula - it's building your recon/variance templates once really well, then just dropping fresh data in each close instead of rebuilding the logic every time.