Accountant says Hola

Hello Dear Forum Members,

I'd like to introduce myself.
I'm relatively new to the accounting area, I've been working for just a year now in public practice.

The greater vision is to:

• Move from public accounting into an analyst role or
• Open my own accounting practice with efficient processes in place or
• Move into financial accounting for a large corporation and work towards becoming the CFO. (Yes, I dream big )

My technical learning goals are:

• Learn excel formulas (in order to solve day to day accounting problems)
• Learn Macros & VBA to utlise automation
• Learn how to combine VBA with other languages such as Autohotkey (AHK) to increase automation

With the last point on the list, it would be great if you could point me into a direction.
I've got the following scenario in mind:
Everyday the Tax file number is copied manually into the Taxation office search bar by thousands of accountants.
There should be a way to create a hotkey, that highlights the tax file number (TFN) and copies it into the tax office website and press enter.

I have used a similar script before, which was based on AHK. I have not written that script myself and I don't have it on my machine anymore.
I'd be interested to hear if AHK is the way to go to solve these problems or if I should focus my research in other areas?

Public accountants:
Is there an 'accountant excel' area / forum ? I can imagine in particular public accountants would come across a lot of the similar issues and scripts and workbooks such as the above could be shared and discussed.

Regarding my job:
In my firm i'm doing a lot of repetitive tasks and we have an 'excel guru' already in the firm. Hence I'm not getting exposure to developing new processes.
I have come up with a more efficient way to import data from the Tax office website into our excel, by copy and pasting with a simple v-lookup & sumif, but even there I'm facing resistance in terms of concerns from my managers such as:
- How much time have you spent on it, how much time will it save (135 manually typed cells vs copy and pasting 12 times under my new version. It should be self explanatory, but apparently people are resistant to change?)
- How long will it take for people to learn (How hard is it to learn copy and paste .... ? )

In order to develop my excel skills I'm revisiting sheets created by the 'excel guru' in my firm and learning the formulae behind it. Sometimes with the result of finding a better way.

Now at the moment i believe it's not the wisest thing to recommend more ways to optimise workflow, as my first suggestion was viewed as a good idea, but then the arguments against it came as described above.
Since I'm new in the firm as well (started 3 weeks ago) I don't want to be seen as someone who is more concerned with 'fancy' excel formulas than getting the work done that he is supposed to do (Tax returns), probably too late for that though. It's laughable how new ideas and input is encouraged when you start, then you come up with something and the response is: "Yeah good idea, but we had so much change lately ... so probably not..."

If you have any other suggestions as to avenues I could pursue in order to expand my horizons with the above three goals in mind: Moving to an analyst role, opening my own accounting firm, working in a commercial financial accounting role, please do share.


Thanks for reading my post, I'm looking forward to learn together.
Pete

Hello PeterLing,

Welcome to Excelforum. Be a part of large Excel community. Enjoy Learning.

Thanks mate,
May I ask how I can change my profile picture?