Excel practice for accountants: type real formulas, get instant feedback

Short, hands-on lessons built on accounting work: cash ledgers, trial balances, AR aging, bank reconciliations, depreciation schedules and loan payments. You type the formula, the grid checks it on the spot, and a wrong answer gets a correction that names the mistake. A plain "incorrect" doesn't tell you much.

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Sample: SUM, AVERAGE and MAX on a cash ledger

Maple Lane Bakery recorded six cash receipts. In C8, total the receipts.

What this is

Excel for Accountants Practice is a practice site for people who need to use Excel in an accounting or finance job, or who need to pass an Excel test to get one. Each lesson is a short explanation, one worked example, and a set of exercises in a spreadsheet-style grid inside your browser. You click into the formula bar, type a formula such as =SUMIF($B$2:$B$13,F2,$C$2:$C$13), and press Enter. The site calculates your formula against the sample data, fills it down when the task calls for it, and compares every resulting cell with the correct result.

Nothing needs to be installed and there is no account. Your progress, points and streak are saved only in this browser. The data in every exercise is invented for practice: the bakery, the dental studio, the courier company and all their numbers are fictional.

Who it is for

• Accounting and finance students who know debits and credits but have not had to build a schedule in a spreadsheet yet.
• People applying for staff accountant, AP, AR, bookkeeping or accounts assistant roles where the hiring process includes an Excel test.
• Career changers moving into finance operations from another field.
• People who have just started a job and want to get faster at the spreadsheet tasks they now see every week, without sitting through hours of video.

If you already build three-statement models with dynamic arrays, this will feel basic. The lessons start from SUM and move up to lookups, conditional totals, dates and loan math, the core skills listed below, and finish with a timed mock test.

Why practice beats watching

Watching someone else write a formula feels like learning, but recognizing a formula when you see it is a different skill from producing it under time pressure. The gap shows up in a test, when there is a blank cell and a clock. The way to close it is to type the formula yourself, get it wrong in the usual ways, and fix it while the reason is fresh.

That is why every exercise here works the same way. You read a task written the way a manager or a test would phrase it ("total the debits for each account and fill it down"). You write the formula. If it is wrong, the feedback tells you what kind of wrong it is: a range that stops one row early, a tax rate that slides when filled down because it is not locked with $, a VLOOKUP missing FALSE, a debit and credit the wrong way round, or text missing its quotes. Then you try again. Repeating that loop is what makes the patterns stick.

Videos are still useful for seeing a feature for the first time. The exercises are where you check that you can actually do it.

What an accounting Excel test usually looks like

Employers screen Excel skills in a few different ways. Some send a short multiple-choice quiz. Some use a simulated spreadsheet in the browser, where you carry out tasks one at a time. Others, especially in finance teams, hand you a workbook and ask you to clean it up, summarise it and answer questions, sometimes while someone watches and sometimes as a take-home. The formats change, so ask the recruiter which one you will get. It is a normal question.

The skills underneath are fairly stable. For accounting roles they usually include:

• Totals, averages and absolute references (locking a rate or a date with $).
• Conditional totals with SUMIF and SUMIFS, for example building a trial balance or a department-by-month summary.
• Lookups with VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP or INDEX/MATCH against a chart of accounts or a vendor list.
• Logic with IF, including nested IFs for aging buckets.
• Dates: days past due, month-end dates with EOMONTH.
• Cleaning exported data with LEFT, TRIM and VALUE.
• Finance basics: depreciation with SLN and DDB, loan payments with PMT, and rounding to the cent.

Reviewers also notice how you work, beyond the final number. A result typed in by hand usually scores nothing, because nobody can see where it came from. One formula filled down a column is better than a different formula in every row. The checker here follows the same rules. If you type the right number without a formula, it tells you so and asks for the formula.

How the exercises work

Each exercise shows a small sheet with column letters and row numbers, just like a spreadsheet. The yellow cell is where your formula goes. If the task says to fill the formula down, the cells it will be filled into are shaded too. When you press Enter, your formula is copied into each of those cells with relative references moving and $-locked references staying put, the same way the fill handle works. Every filled cell has to match.

A few details make it feel closer to the real thing:

• Point and click. While you are typing, click a cell to insert its address, and shift-click to turn it into a range.
• Inspect cells. Click any cell to see what it contains, including the formulas behind pre-filled columns.
• Hints and answers. A hint is always one click away. After two wrong attempts you can reveal one correct answer, but you still have to type it to complete the exercise.
• Points and streaks. Each exercise you complete adds points, and practicing on consecutive days builds a streak. Small, but it helps you come back tomorrow.

The grid is a practice tool, not Microsoft Excel. It understands the functions used in the lessons and follows Excel's rules for them, including operator order, exact and approximate matching, and the way text and numbers compare. Formulas use commas between arguments, as in US versions of Excel.

The lessons

Each lesson has its own page with a short explanation, a worked example and graded exercises. They build on each other, but you can jump to the topic you need.

• Lesson 1: SUM, AVERAGE and MAX on a cash ledger
  3 exercisesFree
• Lesson 2: Absolute references: lock the tax rate with $
  3 exercisesFree
• Lesson 3: Running balances with debits and credits
  3 exercisesFree
• Lesson 4: SUMIF: build a trial balance from journal lines
  3 exercisesFree
• Lesson 5: VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP with a chart of accounts
  3 exercisesFull course
• Lesson 6: Accounts receivable aging with dates and nested IF
  3 exercisesFull course
• Lesson 7: Bank reconciliation: find outstanding checks
  3 exercisesFull course
• Lesson 8: Depreciation schedules with SLN and DDB
  4 exercisesFull course
• Lesson 9: SUMIFS: expenses by department and month
  2 exercisesFull course
• Lesson 10: Prepaid and accrual schedules with EOMONTH and ROUND
  3 exercisesFull course
• Lesson 11: INDEX and MATCH: look up to the left
  2 exercisesFull course
• Lesson 12: Clean a GL export: LEFT, TRIM and VALUE
  3 exercisesFull course
• Lesson 13: Loan payments and interest with PMT
  3 exercisesFull course
• Lesson 14: Timed mock test: 10 mixed accounting Excel tasks
  10 exercisesFull course

What is free

Lessons 1 to 4 are free and fully usable now, with no sign-up. The other lessons show their explanation and worked example for free. Their exercises are part of a full course that is not available yet.

A one-week plan before an Excel test

If you start a week out, here is one way to split the lessons:

1. Day 1: lessons 1 and 2 (totals and absolute references). Most fill-down errors come from these two ideas.
2. Day 2: lesson 3 (running balances and IF) and lesson 4 (SUMIF trial balance).
3. Day 3: lesson 5 (lookups) and lesson 11 (INDEX and MATCH).
4. Day 4: lesson 9 (SUMIFS summaries with mixed references).
5. Day 5: lessons 6 and 7 (aging and bank reconciliation).
6. Day 6: lessons 8, 10 and 13 (depreciation, prepaids, loans) and lesson 12 (cleaning exports).
7. Day 7: redo every exercise you needed a hint for, without the hint, then take the timed mock test (lesson 14) if you have access to it.

If you have only one evening, do lessons 2, 4, 5 and 9: absolute references, SUMIF, lookups and SUMIFS underpin most of the other lessons.

Mistakes that cost points

• Typing results instead of formulas. A typed number can't be audited and won't update when the data changes.
• Forgetting to lock a reference. Row 2 looks right, and every row below quietly goes wrong. Press F4 on the reference.
• Approximate matches by accident. VLOOKUP without FALSE and MATCH without 0 can return a wrong row without any error.
• SUMIF and SUMIFS argument order. SUMIF puts the range to add last. SUMIFS puts it first.
• Ranges that include the total row. An average or a maximum that includes the total is wrong but looks believable.
• Debits and credits the wrong way round. Assets increase with debits, while liabilities and revenue increase with credits. Your formula should follow the account's normal balance.
• Not rounding to the cent. Monthly amounts that are not rounded leave penny differences that a reviewer will find.

Questions

Do I need Excel installed?

No. Everything runs in your browser, on a computer or a tablet. A keyboard makes typing formulas much easier.

Do I need an account?

No. There is no sign-up. Progress is stored in your browser's local storage on this device. Clearing your browser data resets it.

Is this the same as the test my employer will use?

No. This site is not connected to any test provider and does not use real test questions. It practices the skills those tests usually cover, using original exercises and invented data.

Does it work with Google Sheets?

The functions taught here work the same way in Google Sheets for these tasks. XLOOKUP is available in current versions of both Excel and Google Sheets. Older Excel versions do not have it, so the lessons also teach VLOOKUP with IFERROR and INDEX/MATCH.

Is my data collected?

No. There are no ads, cookies or sign-ups, and your formulas are never sent anywhere. The site counts visits anonymously with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies. See the privacy note.

Who made this?

Excel for Accountants Practice is a small independent project. The lessons and this page were written with AI assistance, and every exercise is checked by automated tests that confirm the reference answer passes and common wrong answers are caught. See About. It is not affiliated with Microsoft. Excel is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.