Last week, I covered how to calculate discounted cash flow. In this post, I’ll build off that worksheet and show you how you can calculate the internal rate of return (IRR) in Excel. IRR tells you the return that you’re making on an investment or project, and at what discount rate the net present value of all the cash flows will be zero. In these scenarios, there’s typically an outlay of cash, usually at the beginning.
In my previous example, I only looked at cash flows coming in. This time, I’ll look at a scenario where you pay money out at the beginning and generate cash flow in future periods. A common example is paying to upgrade a piece of equipment and then generating cost savings from it for x number of years. Knowing the IRR can tell you if you’re making enough of a return off of the investment and whether you should move forward with it. Using IRR can also be helpful when you’re comparing multiple options to see which one is the best one.
Setting up the spreadsheet
This step is about the same as when setting up the discounted cash flow template. You’ll need to enter the different years, the cash you expect to come in or out, and then calculate back what the present value is today.
Here’s what the file looks like setting in a scenario where you pay $100,000 upfront and then generate $10,000 in cash flow for 25 years. At a 5% discount rate, in this example the present value of all that cash flow is a positive $40,939.45:
Calculating the IRR
The problem here is the discount rate can be difficult to determine, and that can have a significant impact on your overall returns. And so rather than worry about what your discount rate should be, you only need to determine the IRR — which is to say at what point would your present value be worth $0? If you need a higher return than the IRR the project would be a no-go but if you’re okay with anything up to and including the IRR, then the project or investment would be passable. What it comes down to is the lower the IRR is, the worse the investment is
There are a couple of different ways to calculate IRR in Excel. One way is through a formula called XIRR. It only has two required arguments — dates and cash flow. This is why in this example I entered dates for my cash flows rather than just numbering the years. This makes it easier for me to use the XIRR formula. In my spreadsheet, I enter the following formula:
=XIRR(D6:D31,C6:C31)
Column D contains my cash flow and column C contains the dates. Doing this, Excel tells me the IRR is 9.687% for this specific project. But if I work backwards and calculate the net present value, it doesn’t get me right to 0:
It certainly gets close to 0 and it’s probably close enough that it can help you make a decision about your investment. However, there’s another way to calculate IRR and that’s using Excel’s What-If Analysis. On the Data tab, there’s a drop-down for this option in the Forecast section:
Depending on which version of Excel you’re using, it may show a bit differently, but what you’re ultimately looking for is Goal Seek.
Goal Seek is an accelerated way of doing trial-and-error. Excel’s doing it for you much quicker than you could ever do it by yourself. For IRR, it’s the best solution.
Here’s how it works. You’ll need to enter the cell that you want to get to a certain value, what value that is, and which cell Excel should be changing values in. In my spreadsheet, E2 is where my net present value formula is, and I want that to equal 0. In cell B2 is my discount rate, which is what I want Excel to be changing. Here are what my inputs look like:
Then, once I click on OK, Excel goes to work. After a few seconds you should see Excel show you that the target value and the current value are a match (e.g. they’re both 0), meaning it’s done its job successfully:
Now, if I look at my template, I see a different discount rate and my total present value is netting out to 0:
As you can see, this is much more accurate than Excel’s XIRR function. You can repeat these steps and make this table for other projects that you can assess side-by-side.
If you’d like to test this out, try downloading the discounted cash flow spreadsheet from my last post and then just using Goal Seek or the XIRR function to determine your IRR. You can remove unnecessary columns from the sheet and then duplicate the table, and then you’ve got a template where you can assess multiple investments against one another.
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Do you need to calculate the present value of future cash flows or assess two options that will impact your cash flow over many years? Excel’s a great place to do that and below I’ll show you how you can easily set up a template to calculate discounted cash flow that you can adjust for changes in the discount rate and cash flow. And if you don’t want to create your own template, you can download mine at the bottom of this post.
In this example, I’ll compare a lump sum lottery win versus a scenario where you receive an annual amount for 25 years. Step one is knowing to calculate present value, which is what I’ll cover next:
Calculating the preset value
To calculate the present value of future cash flow, you need to know what discount rate to use. What you can use is the rate that you can earn on a typical investment. For instance, if you invest in stocks and assume you can make 5% per year, on average, then you might want to use that as your discount rate. If you want to be more conservative, you could use a rate of 2%. Below, you’ll see how the discount rate can play a big impact in your calculations.
That’s because when calculating today’s present value, you have to use the discount rate to bring the future value back to what it would be worth today. For example, suppose you were to receive a $10,000 payment a year from now, and your discount rate was 5%. An easy way to calculate this is as follows:
You might see other formulas on the web involving fractions to calculate present value but just using a negative power does the trick. This calculation yields a result of $9,523.81. Because you’re not getting the payment today, the value of that money is worth less than the full amount. Consider that if you were to receive $10,000 today and invest it and earn 5%, then a year from now it would be worth $10,500 — more than if you were to receive the $10,000 in a year.
Now, suppose you used a discount rate of just 2%. In that scenario, the $10,000 payment a year from now would be worth $9,803.92 today. Since the discount rate is lower, there’s less of a cost associated with waiting for your payment. If the discount rate was 0%, then there would be no incentive for you to invest your money since a year from now it would still be worth the same value it is today. That’s why when interest rates fall and get closer to zero, people will be less inclined to keep their money at the bank and there’s more demand for gold — since that can be a better way to store wealth at that point.
Creating a template to calculate discounted cash flow in Excel
Now that we’ve gone over how to calculate discounted cash flow in Excel, we can set up the template. All that’s really necessary here is to map out the payment schedule, including how much cash you’ll receive every year. Here’s an example scenario of receiving $100,000 for 25 years:
All the payments don’t have to be the same, but for the lottery example, I’m going to keep them that way. What I can do is create another column that will tell me the present value of each one of those payments. To do that, I’ll use a formula that takes the cash flow value, multiples it by the discount rate (I’ll use 5%) raised to a negative power (the year). Here’s how that looks:
I created a discount rate named range so that it’s easy to reference the percentage and to change it. The only thing left here is to calculate the total of all these payments, to arrive at the present value of all of them:
The total present value of the payments comes in at just over $1.4 million. Even though the total of all the payments over 25 years is $2.5 million, we’re losing a lot of that value because of the time value of money, at a rate of 5% per year.
However, let’s prove this out, and to do that let’s look at the future value of all these payments. Let’s assume that these funds will be reinvested and earning a rate of 5% every year. Here’s how much we’d have by the end of year 25:
In this situation, we’re benefitting from compounding and earning 5% on each year’s ending balance, which includes the prior-year return. By the end of year 25, if we were to invest all of these $100,000 payments at a rate of 5%, we’d have a future ending value of $4,772,709.88.
Now, remember, the equivalent of these annual payments is a present value of $1,409,394.46. Let’s assume that rather than receiving annual payments of $100,000, we simply receive a lump sum payment of this and invest it and also earn 5% every year. Here’s how that will look like:
The ending value after 25 years is the same, $4,772,709.88. This tells us that if you’re given the option of 25 annual payments of $100,000 or a lump sum of $1,409,394.46 today, there’s no difference to you (if the discount rate you’re using is 5%). If the discount rate is 2%, then the present value climbs to $1,952,345.65.
As you can see, depending on which discount rate you use, it can have a significant impact on your present value calculations. This template will allow you to quickly change the discount rate and see how the calculation looks under different scenarios. You can also add more years to this calculation by just extending the formulas down. The amounts also don’t need to be identical, they were only set up this way purely for the purpose of comparing lottery winnings in a scenario where you earn one lump sum amount versus equal payments over multiple decades.
If you’d like to download this template to follow along, the free version is available here, which goes up to year 15. For the full and unlocked version, which has no ads and goes up to 30 years, please refer to the product page here.
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If you’re an accountant, you know that quickly doing a t-account can sometimes help you plan your journal entries and save you some headaches later on. But sometimes it can be time-consuming and a bit cumbersome to go through the process of setting everything up in an Excel spreadsheet. That’s where my new, live t-account template can help you.
Simply go to this link and you’ll be taken to a page where you can start creating your t-accounts on the fly. All you need to do is first make sure you name the accounts along the top and then record the entries on the left-hand-side. The accounts will automatically update as you enter the data.
Here’s a quick demo of how the page works:
It supports 20 line items and five accounts. And if you make a mistake or want to make another set of t-accounts, you can just refresh the page to clear what you’ve entered.
If you like the live t-account template and find it useful, please give this site a like on Facebook and also be sure to check out some of the many templates that we have available for download.
If you need to track employee sick days and vacation, then the time off tracker template can help you. This template can also help you decide whether to approve or deny time-off requests as well. Below, I’ll go over the main features of the template and how it works.
On the Summary tab, you’ll start with a list of all the employees you want to track. This will include their hourly wage, start date, their beginning balance for their vacation days, as well as their vacation rate. The time off tracker template will also track sick days as well.
You can enter the current year and the cutoff date if you want to see up to a certain point in time. The annual hours and vacation rate percentage will impact the annual vacation day accrual. Annual hours you’ll probably want to set to either 2,000 (50 weeks x 40 hours) or 2,080 (52 weeks x 40 hours).
For sick days, there is a section off to the right on the summary page where you can enter the number of sick days people are entitled to annually. You can also specify a maximum number of people that can be off at any one time. This is related to approving requests which I’ll cover further down.
You’ll also see a section for holidays and blackout days for when you don’t want people taking time off. These lists can be as long as you like.
Entering and requesting time off
Whether you want to check if a person can book time off during a certain period or if you want to actually book it, you’ll do this through the Request.Form tab. Here, you can select the employee, the type of request (vacation or sick), and how long they will be off for. This template assumes employees do not work weekends. If the request includes a weekend, it will automatically account for that. Here’s a sample request for someone looking to take Jan. 24 – Jan. 31 off.
The available days, hours, days requested and hours requested will all automatically fill in once you enter all your selections. You’ll notice the days requested equals six, which isn’t counting Saturday and Sunday. It also assumes these are full days off and hence multiplies the days off by an eight-hour workday to get to 48 hours requested off.
If you want to see if this request complies with your policy (blackout rules, maximum people off) you can click on the Check Availability button. Then you will see the following summary:
The lights come up green for having sufficient time available and there being enough coverage. But it comes up red because the request includes a blackout day. Over on the right-hand side, you’ll see the person’s most recent time-off requests. It will also show any people who are off during this time.
You can still proceed and click the Post Time-Off Request button either way. It will post the information into the Timeoff tab:
If I double-click on any of the red boxes to the right, it will delete an entry. There is no data that needs to be entered on this tab, this is simply for record-keeping. The Timeoff tab is used to populate other areas of the spreadsheet.
If I were to go back and try and book another entry on Jan. 31 for a different employee, it will now tell me that someone is off during this time:
Note: you won’t be prevented from posting vacation if a person already has vacation booked for the same date. But if you make a mistake you can clear the duplicate entry from the Timeoff tab. You can also visually see who is off during a given period on the Calendar tab:
Blackout days are highlighted in black, vacation is dark blue, weekends are light blue and sick days are in yellow. In the above example it shows the one employee who took a vacation day during the blackout period. The color code for vacation overrides the blackout formatting. From this, you can also see that two employees were off on Jan. 31.
Entering in partial-day requests
If an employee is taking a half-day or only a certain amount of hours off rather than a full day, you can select the Partial Day option from the drop-down in the Request.Form tab. A new field will appear, allowing you to enter the hours per day:
In this example, this employee is requesting 5 hours off on both Jan. 30 and Jan. 31. The employee is requesting a total of 10 hours off, or 1.25 days. If you need to do a partial request, you can’t mix and match with full-day requests, you’ll need to do them separately. Even if the hours are different, multiple requests will be needed.
Whether an employee takes a full or a partial day off, it’ll look the same on the Calendar tab.
Adjusting for rate changes
One of the more complex calculations this time off tracker template factors in is if an employee moves to new pay rate or if their vacation rate changes during the year. This is where the Ratechanges tab comes into play. You select the employee, the date that the change is effective as well as the date it ends – this can be left blank if there’s no further rate change. The purpose of the end date is if there are multiple changes for an employee during the year.
Then, you enter the new hourly wage and vacation rate. Enter bothnumbers. For instance, if an employee now accrues 6% vacation rather than 4%, you’ll want to enter the new vacation rate but you’ll also want to enter in their hourly wage as well, even if it remains the same. This is important so that the formula calculates correctly.
This calculation will spit out a change in daily accrual as well as a total adjustment for the year based on the cut-off date. This adjustment will populate on the Summary tab under the Vacation Days Adj (Rate Changes) field.
As with any complex calculations, always be sure to double-check these numbers against your own. Especially when it comes to multiple rate changes a year, it’s important to ensure the data is entered correctly and that the correct number of days are being accrued. Although I’ve tested the spreadsheet, it’s impossible to factor in every possible situation and so I cannot guarantee 100% accuracy in all situations.
If you’d like to test out the template, you can download the free version here which is limited to tracking five employees. The full version has no limits and there are no ads and the code is fully unlocked:
If you liked this post on the time off tracker template, please give this site a like on Facebook and also be sure to check out some of the many templates that we have available for download. You can also follow us on Twitter and YouTube.
Whether you’re doing a forecast or looking back at how your sales were over a period of time, it’s important to ensure that you’re comparing apples to apples. While monthly and yearly numbers won’t have too much noise, once you’re trying to do a daily or weekly sales analysis, that’s when things can get a little challenging.
Below, I’ll show you how you can do a weekly sales analysis where you’re comparing the same days of the week against one another. This will give you an accurate picture of your year-over-year performance.
Step one: determine which day of the week you want to start on
This is a simple step and you’re probably going to go with either Sunday or Monday. But it’s an important one to consider because when you’re looking at weekly sales numbers, you want to be consistent. And while you can refer to the week number when comparing one week to a previous year, saying week 32 is not going to be as useful as saying the week starting August 5 or ending August 11.
In my example, I’m going to use Monday as my starting point to ensure that I’m not breaking up the weekend (the default in Excel is Sunday). To make it easy to compare a week, it will be helpful to create a header for the days of the week so it looks like a calendar.
Step two: entering the first date of the weekday you selected
The first Monday of 2020, wasn’t until Jan. 6 this year, which would be the second week of the year if we start on Mondays. The previous Monday was Dec. 30, which was technically week 53. Weeks 1 and 53 are often abbreviated. For now, just accept that there’s no Monday in Week 1 of 2020. I’ll show you how we can get around this problem further down.
For now, Jan. 6 will be our starting point which we’ll call Week 2. Now, that we have our starting point, we can build out what our subsequent weeks will look like.
For example, if I want to find out the start date for week 40, what I can do is simply use the following formula:
First, I multiply 7 by the difference in weeks. Then, add that to the first Monday value. In this example, it tells me the 40th Monday of the year is Sep 28, 2020. That’s why setting up the first Monday values is important to ensure that it’s easy to get the remaining dates.
This is the easier approach to take. However, later on I’ll show you a way where you don’t have to enter in the first Monday of the year.
Step three: filling in the remaining dates of the week for your sales analysis
Getting the starting date of the week is the toughest part. From there, all you have to add is just add 1 to each subsequent day:
Just adding 1 to the previous date will increment to the next day. No special formulas needed here.
Step four: getting the prior-year date
To get the previous year’s data you can follow the same approach as in step two. However, I’ll use this as an opportunity to show you another way that you can get the data. One that won’t require you to pull out the calendar.
First, we need to know what day of the week Jan. 1, 2019 fell on. To do this, we can just use the following formula:
=WEEKDAY(“Jan 1, 2019”,2)
The reason I put the number 2 as the second argument is because my week is starting on a Monday. If I set it to 1 or left it blank, the default would be Sunday. This is important because if Monday is my first day of the week then it’s day value is 1 and Sunday is 7. Had I used Sunday, then Sunday would have a value of 1 and Monday would be 2. This is why it’s important to know which day of the week you want your week to start on.
In 2019, Jan. 1 fell on a Tuesday, and the formula above gave me the result of 2. (Monday is 1, so Tuesday would be 2). The reason I need to know the weekday is because I need to adjust the date to find out when that week actually started. I use the following formula to do that:
What this formula does is subtracts Jan 1, 2019 from the number of days it is above day 1. It then moves the date back. I can simplify this formula by entering Jan 1. 2019 in cell A1. Then my formula looks like this:
=A1-(WEEKDAY(A1,2)-1))
I no longer need to use the DATEVALUE function and now it’s a bit easier to use. There’s also less chance of an error when entering the date. Now, when I want to find out the first day of the week, I can multiply 7 times the week number and add to this calculation:
=(A1-(WEEKDAY(A1,2)-1))+(7*(B1-1))
B1 is the week number. In this example, if I were to enter Jan 1. 2019 for cell A1, that would give me a result of Dec 31. 2018 for the start of Week 1. Excel also considers this to be the week that contains Week 53 and Week 1. This is where you can get around this issue. By calling this Week 1 of the current year and including December’s days into this week, it will ensure you don’t have the Week 53 problem. It may not look great to call the previous year’s dates part of the new year but it avoids having to manually make adjustments for this period.
Using the updated formula, I can change the Jan. 1 date to reflect 2019 and use week 40 to update my comparables for the weekly sales analysis:
From here, it’s just a matter of now using a SUMIF function on your data to pull the sales for each one of these dates and you’ve got your comparable sales numbers. With 2020 being a leap year, you can see that the dates have moved up two days from the prior year. Without the date adjustment, you could have ended up comparing a Sunday (Oct 4, 2020) against a Friday (Oct 4, 2020).
If you liked this post on how to do a weekly sales analysis, please give this site a like on Facebook and also be sure to check out some of the many templates that we have available for download. You can also follow us on Twitter and YouTube.
This bank reconciliation template is an update from an earlier file that was made three years ago. It offers many of the same features with some notable improvements, and I’ll go over both in this post. I’ll start off by highlighting the key features and how it can help improve the bank reconciliation process for you.
Matching transactions is easier than ever in this new bank reconciliation template
In the earlier version, the bank reconciliation template looked at the total of transactions for a day or that matched criteria and so it didn’t make match individual items. It can be a mixed bag since some people prefer one way of matching (e.g. multiple cash transactions on a book entry matching up to one large bank deposit amount versus having one deposit for each entry). This template tries to make both methods a bit easier.
The auto-matching feature takes care of the latter approach where each line is effectively given a unique id that will be used to match against other transactions. This is ideal for one-to-one matches where you don’t want to look at just the totals.
If you’ve used the earlier version of this file, you’ll know that in this template, you can set up categories and keys associated with them. For example, if a check transaction shows up on your accounting system as CK#1234 you can create a rule in this template to say anything with CK in the description is categorized as a check and that the numbers that follow the number sign form the key, or the unique identifier. You can create these rules in the Setup tab.
Here are a couple of examples as to how this looks:
The Category is just the name of the category and the Identifier is what Excel will be looking for in the item description to see if it falls into that category or not. For checks, I’ve used the use numbers after identifier to say that what comes after CK# is what should be the key or the criteria that the template will be looking for when auto-matching. If there is no criteria, you can leave this blank and it’ll simply look at the amount and the category. However, this can be less accurate depending on if you have duplicates and similar data in your bank and book downloads.
You can also cap the length of the key, which is what I did in the above example, setting the Length of Key to 4. What this does is say that only the first four numbers will be pulled after the identifier. You can leave this blank and everything will be included. There is also a section for Gap if you don’t want it to immediately start pulling numbers after it finds the key. For instance, if I used CK as the identifier rather than CK#, then I’d want to set the Gap field to 1, to ensure that it skips over the next character, which in this case would be the # sign. But if you want to immediately pull data after the identifier, you can leave the Gap blank.
Alternatively, you can also just use the date as your key but that will not be very precise. The template and auto-matching will only be as strong as the rules that you put into place.
Manually matching transaction is easy, too
Even if you can’t auto-match all your transactions, I’ve tried to make this template as easy as possible to bulk match transactions as well. While the auto-matching is designed to help one-to-one matches, it’s also possible to match multiple transactions to one. This can be done using the Reconciler, which can be accessed via the Ribbon:
In the previous version, these buttons were within the file. Now, they’re on the home tab within the Ribbon, making it easy to access from anywhere in the file. Select a transaction from either the Book or Bank tabs and click the Reconciler button and you’ll have an interface where you can easily match transactions side-by-side:
In the previous version, side-by-side matching was not possible in the Reconciler and this allows you to easily do your matching within this interface. If I select the first transaction, which is a wire transfer, it will show me all the possible wire transfers I can match it to:
However, the ability to match the transactions won’t appear until I have the credits and debits matching an equal amount on both sides, to prevent running into a situation where I’ve matched an unequal amount:
By default, there will be no warning to pop-up when you’re matching transactions. However, if you prefer there to be one, you can change this in the Setup tab where there’s an option to toggle the confirmation from ‘No’ to ‘Yes.’
With it set to off, you can continue going through and matching transactions to ensure that you don’t have to click boxes before moving on to the next item to match. As it’s set up, you can match multiple items to one amount. However, you can’t match multiple-to-multiple and if you want to match multiple to one, then select the one transaction that will be matched to multiple items when launching the Reconciler. In the above screenshot, any transactions on the left-hand-side can be matched to multiple transactions on the right-hand-side, but not vice versa.
However, there is a SWAP button at the top of the form, which is also new, which can allow you to easily switch between the two views.
On both the Book and Bank tabs, there is a column for Manual Override and if you want to match an item manually you just need to enter a value in here. And that’s what the Reconciler does when you’re matching transactions. This is also where the next key feature comes into play: auditing and correcting your matches.
Audit trail from the Reconciler makes it easy to see which transactions are matched to one another
In the transaction that I matched above, it posted this in the Manual Override section:
You’ll notice that it says Previous BOOK Row 6. What this tells me is that the transaction was reconciled on the Previous OS Items tab, which includes transactions carried over from the previous period. It also tells me the row it was on and that it came from the book side. If the entry were to say Current, then it would be from the current transactions and that it would just be from the Book tab rather than the Previous OS Items tab.
If I wanted to undo this match, I could just press delete and clear the data in the Manual Override column. However, if you do this, be sure to clear off the other entry or entries related to it. Otherwise, you can be out of balance if you only cleared out one side of what was matched.
Reconciling the month
Once you’re done with your reconciliation and you want to see a list of your outstanding items, you can click on the Reconcile Month button in the Ribbon. This will spit out the outstanding items and group them by category. This process is similar to how the older version of the file worked.
When you’re finished and ready to start a new month or period, you can click on the New Month button which will clear the Book and Bank tabs and move any outstanding items over to the Previous OS Items tab. You’ll now be able to start a new month or period.
You can also use the Clear Data tab if you just want to remove everything and start completely from scratch
Testing out the file
If you want to give this file a try, please download the bank reconciliation template for free here. You can test out all the functions. There is a limit of just 25 transactions on the Bank and Book tabs. If you want the full version of the product, including with the code unlocked, please visit the product page here.
If you liked this post on the new bank reconciliation template, please give this site a like on Facebook and also be sure to check out some of the many templates that we have available for download. You can also follow us on Twitter and YouTube.
QuickBooks does a good job when it comes to recording sales and doing day-to-day accounting tasks. You may be content with the reports that come out of QuickBooks, too. But if you’re looking for some more in-depth analysis to do of your own or to make your own reports, you’re likely going to want to move that data into Excel. And, unfortunately, the QuickBooks export into Excel can be less than optimal.
With many spaces, subtotals, and a non-tabular format, it’s not a very practical output to use in Excel. If you want to run a pivot table and do some serious analysis in Excel, you first have to clean up the data before being able to use it, and that can be a very tedious and tiresome process.
For example, this is what your QuickBooks report might look like when you’re pulling a simple summary of your customer sales:
There are a lot of things that need to be adjusted for this report to be useable in Excel, including getting rid of the blank spaces and ensuring that the customer information is repeated in the first column, as opposed to just in the first line and in the last line’s total. From afar, it’s a bit of a painful process to have to go in and clean this up. And while it’s not impossible, it’s not going to be quick, either.
That’s where a macro can help you make the task much quicker and it will save you a lot of time if you have to go through these steps often. Click the button on the ribbon and your data will convert into a more table-friendly format! Here’s how it works:
Using the macro to fix the QuickBooks export
Before running the macro, you’ll need to specify the columns where your customer names and dates are:
Then, run the Covert Data button:
Downloading the file
The free version of the QuickBooks macro will allow you to run the conversion if it doesn’t go past 100 rows. However, if you decide to purchase the full version please ensure that the macro and file works as expected. There’s no guarantee the QuickBooks export hasn’t changed or won’t change in the future. If there are changes that need to be made to the macro, please feel free to contact me so that I can make the necessary adjustments. Whether you prefer the add-In or the actual Excel spreadsheet itself, both versions are available both here and in the paid version as well.
Here is the download link for the add-in as well as the Excel file. For the paid versions, please visit the product page.
If you have another program or software that you’d like a similar add-in for, I can help with that as well.
If you liked this post, please give this site a like on Facebook and also be sure to check out some of the many templates that we have available for download. You can also follow us on Twitter and YouTube.
There are many Excel calendars online but with this template, you can customize it to suit your needs and use the calendar for more than just one year.
At a minimum, you can use the template to help generate a 12-month calendar for a specific year. However, it can do a whole lot more than that. If you want to use it for a custom fiscal year, you can use a different start date. You can also use custom accounting periods based on weeks, whether it’s the 4-4-5, 4-5-4, or 5-4-4. It can help make a template that will fit all of those needs.
And on top of that, you can also highlight holidays and deadlines on the calendar to make it easy to keep track of all your important dates.
How the template works
There are two tabs on the calendar template: calendar and setup. The only area to enter data is on the setup tab, and that’s where you will select the details relating to how you want your calendar to display.
The first item that you’ll want to enter is the start of the fiscal year. If you just want a regular calendar, then you can leave this as January 1. However, you’ll want to enter the year that you want the calendar for as well. This is the only cell where you’ll specify both the year for the calendar and the first day of the calendar as well.
On the following field, you can toggle between whether your week starts on Sunday or Monday. This will just impact how the calendar looks and will have no effect on anything else in the template.
If you just need a regular 12-month calendar, that’s all you need. If, however, you’re looking for a more customized format that accommodates a varying week schedule, then you will want to enter an ‘X’ in the Custom Quarterly Format field. If you do not enter an ‘X’ here, then the following values will be ignored and won’t have a bearing on the calendar.
The next three fields relate to how many weeks each period has. If you have fiscal periods that follow the 4-4-5 pattern where the third month of each quarter is a 5-week month, then you would enter ‘4’ for period 1 and period 2, and ‘5’ for period 3.
Those are all the variables that will relate to the structure of the calendar itself. You can go a bit further, however, and enter in holidays and other important dates as well.
Entering holidays and other dates
In column G you can enter the holidays or non-working days that you observe. Any dates in this column will be highlighted in yellow on the calendar. Columns H and I serve the same purpose, and that’s to highlight any important dates or deadlines. In column H, the dates will be highlighted in red while the ones in column I will be in green.
There’s no restriction on what you can enter in these columns and these deadlines could be annual or monthly. You could even use various date functions to help create recurring deadlines here as well.
You can enter dates in for the entire column so they don’t even need to be for the current year. This is why you can reuse this template for future years, as you can just adjust the starting date for the year and update the holidays, and the template will automatically update based on what you have entered.
Download the 12-month excel calendar template
This template contains no macros and is free to use. You can download it here. It does have some ads and the calendar tab is locked to ensure nothing isn’t overwritten by accident. There is also an ad-free version available here that is completely unlocked. As always, I encourage you to always try the free version first to ensure it works how you expect it to and that it’s what you’re looking for.
Looking for a full-month calendar template?
This template is for a 12-month snapshot but if you’re looking for one that focuses on an individual month and that can allow you to enter tasks and deadlines, be sure to check out this template. It will give you even more options for managing your monthly tasks and deadlines.
And if you’re looking for a personal calendar that will help you manage different goals at once, then this goal tracker template could be what you’re looking for. But if you’re looking for something completely different, feel free to contact me and make a suggestion. I am always looking for new ideas and templates to add to the site.
If you liked this 12 Month Calendar Template, please give this site a like on Facebook and also be sure to check out some of the many templates that we have available for download. You can also follow us on Twitter and YouTube.
A tax-free savings account (TFSA) is a very useful tool for Canadian investors to shield investment gains and dividend income from taxes. However, it can be challenging to keep track of the rules and just how much you’re able to contribute and what your TFSA limit is for the year.
How much can I contribute to my TFSA in 2025?
For 2025, the annual contribution limit for the Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA) is $7,000. This amount is set by the federal government and can increase over time due to indexation for inflation. If you were at least 18 years old in 2009 (the year the TFSA was introduced) and have never contributed, your total available contribution room as of 2025 would be $102,500. That total includes all annual limits from 2009 through 2025. Your personal contribution room may be lower if you’ve contributed in previous years, or higher if you made withdrawals in earlier years, since withdrawals get added back to your room at the start of the following calendar year.
It’s important to note that unused contribution room carries forward indefinitely, so you don’t lose it if you don’t max out your TFSA each year. This flexibility makes the TFSA one of the most powerful investment vehicles for Canadians, since it allows you to plan contributions around your cash flow without worrying about missing out on available room. To confirm your personal TFSA limit, you should always check your CRA “My Account,” as financial institutions don’t track your overall contribution room across multiple accounts.
Do TFSA withdrawals increase my contribution room?
Yes, TFSA withdrawals do increase your contribution room — but not immediately. Any amount you withdraw from your TFSA is added back to your contribution room starting on January 1 of the following year. For example, if you withdraw $5,000 in 2025, your contribution room for 2026 will increase by $5,000 on top of your regular annual limit. This feature makes the TFSA highly flexible, since it allows you to use the account both for long-term investing and for shorter-term goals where you may need access to your funds.
The key detail to remember is that you cannot re-contribute the withdrawn amount in the same calendar year unless you already have unused room available. Re-contributing too early would result in an over-contribution, which is subject to a penalty tax of 1% per month on the excess. To avoid this, it’s best to track your contributions and withdrawals carefully — or use a TFSA tracker — so you know exactly when that room becomes available again. This rule is one of the most common sources of confusion among Canadians, so understanding the timing is essential to getting the most out of your TFSA.
What happens if I over-contribute to my TFSA?
While it may seem simple to track your balance, there’s one issue that can cause headaches for TFSA holders, and that’s when it comes to withdrawing funds. One of the advantages of a TFSA is that since the funds that are contributed are after-tax, you don’t incur any penalties for taking money out. Unlike with an RRSP, you don’t have to worry about a withholding tax. With a TFSA, you can freely move money in and out of your accounts as you need it.
The caveat, however, is that when you withdraw funds, the contribution room isn’t replenished until the beginning of the next calendar year. And so if your TFSA had been maxed out on July 1st and you had withdrawn $10,000, then that will free up contribution room –- but it won’t be until January 1st. Any withdrawals that are made, regardless of the time of the year, won’t free up space until the beginning of the next calendar year.
That’s where much of the complexity comes into play when it comes to TFSAs. While contributions will reduce your available contribution room immediately, withdrawals won’t make that room available until next year. That lag can create many problems for TFSA holders. That lag can give people the misleading impressing that they have contribution room since they recently took money out, and that’s where overcontributing can happen very easily.
Suppose your TFSA is maxed out (2025 cumulative balance is $102,000) and you pull all the funds out today and they re-contributed them immediately after. In this scenario, you’ve now overcontributed by the entire balance -– meaning you’ll get a 1% penalty on that entire amount, which would amount to $1,020. And that’s just for one month. Leave that overcontribution in your TFSA and those penalties will pile up quickly.
While that may not be a common scenario that will take place, it’s an extreme example that helps to demonstrate just how costly it can be to make a very simple mistake. That’s why simply tracking the balance and looking at contributions and withdrawals is not enough, TFSA holders need to factor in the lag that happens with withdrawals. It’s a small but important detail that can make a big difference in determining how much contribution room you have available.
What this template will help you do
The purpose of this template is to help you keep track of both the contributions you make to your TFSA as well as the withdrawals so that you know what your limit is in a given year. If you’ve got multiple TFSAs and they aren’t all at one financial institution, keeping track of all your transactions can be a challenge. That’s where a spreadsheet can come in very handy; having all your information all in one place can make it much easier to stay on top of your TFSAs.
By logging your transactions each time you make a withdrawal or contribution from one of your TFSAs, you can have a complete picture of your balance at any given time. There’s no limit to the number of transactions you can enter in the template, and this can be used for a running total — forever. And with no macros and a simple, easy-to-use interface, the goal of this template is to make the process as painless as possible.
Use this template to track your TFSA limit
The template itself is very simple to use. There’s an area to enter any TFSA transactions, and while you can start from your first year of eligibility, if you know the contribution room you have as of the start of a specific year, you can start from there.
In the header, there is a section where you can specify your contribution room and the year. If for example you’re starting 2025 and you know the contribution room you have is $50,000, this is how you’d enter it:
Upon doing so, the template updates to show the starting room as per that year.
You can, however, start the calculations from your first year of eligibility by selecting from the drop-down list in cell R2:
Next, you can specify any contributions and withdrawals from the TFSA transactions table. If you have multiple TFSA accounts, you can enter the specific one in the account tab. The template will total all of the transactions, making it easy for you to stay on top of your total contributions and withdrawals, regardless of which account they originated from. You can keep adding to the list of transactions as you need to and the table will continue expanding.
All the amounts are to be entered as positive. The type of transaction will ensure that the transaction is put into the correct column and update the balance calculation correctly.
What if I go over my TFSA limit?
If the value in ending room field goes negative and indicates that you have overcontributed to your TFSA, the amounts will be highlighted in red (see below). That being said, just because it hasn’t highlighted in red doesn’t mean you’re safe. You should use this as a guide and not an absolute indicator of whether you’re okay or not.
Planning makes perfect
Even if you haven’t made any transactions during the year, what you can do is to enter transactions you expect, or plan to make. Especially if you’re expecting to withdraw funds, you’ll want to budget for that in this template to ensure that it won’t cause a problem for you. Doing some planning beforehand can help prevent problems down the road, and save some costly surprises.
Checking your data
One of the most important things that you can do is to verify that your data is correct.
When in doubt, your best bet is to confirm with the CRA. If you have My Account setup for access online, what you can do is access your balance as of the beginning of the year. While it won’t have all the contributions and withdrawals that you have made since the start of the year, you will have information on your available room as of January 1. This will at least give you a number that you can use as a starting point and then after factoring in your transactions, you can determine what your up-to-date balance is.
Downloading the file
As always, if you want to go ahead and try the file out just keep in mind there are no guarantees that come with it and that when in doubt, you should always verify your information with the CRA especially when it comes to determining how much room you still have available.
The template will not factor in penalties and ultimately the accuracy of it will depend on how up to date your recordkeeping is.
The TFSA Contribution Tracker Spreadsheet is completely free of charge with no limitations. If you like it, please give this site a like on Facebook and also be sure to check out many other templates that are available for download. You can also follow us on Twitter and YouTube.
If you need to make an invoice and don’t want to spend money on some overpriced software, you can do so easily in Excel with this template. Not only can you customize it to how you want it to look and feel and produce a professional-looking invoice, but you can also track items, set prices based on customers and even have taxes calculated based on location codes.
Ultimately, it’s up to you how complex or simple you want it to be. Here’s how the template works:
The invoice itself
Whether you want to add a logo, change the colors or add some information to the headers, you can have a lot of control over how your invoice looks. The key thing to remember here, however, is not to add or remove any columns or rows. If you need extra space, stretch out the rows or columns, but don’t add any new ones.
And if you need to move the invoice date and number fields, be sure to move them, not delete them or copy and paste. They’re named ranges and so it is important that they remain intact for the code to still work.
Setting up the invoice template
Before you get started and using the template, what you’ll want to do is to set up some items, customers, locations and rates. Unless you really want to start from scratch every time, which I wouldn’t recommend.
First up, start with the Locations tab. If you’re only selling to one part of the world, then just set up a generic location but you can add as many different ones as you need. This is key for ensuring that the correct tax amount is being calculated per customer.
Next up, go to the Customer tab where you’ll have a list of your different customers, including their addresses and location codes. It’s important to add the location codes first because on the customer tabs the locations are drop-down selections that are derived from the locations tab, this ensures that you only select from a location code that has already been created. This is important to ensure that you aren’t mapping to a location that hasn’t been set up, otherwise, you’ll get an error.
Set up all the customers you need. Then next, move over to the Rate tab. Here, you’ll want to set up your customers from columns F onward. On this tab, you will also create your different items and differentiate between products and services. You can create as many items as you want. There is a rate field (column D) when you specify your default rate.
In the columns for your different customers, you can specify a special rate per customer. For example, in the above example, ITEM-1 has a default price of $50. However, if Company A is selected as a customer, a rate of $25 will be applied. If Company B or C is selected, the default rate of $50 will apply since no special pricing has been made available for those customers.
Putting it all together – creating an invoice using the template
With all that set up, now you can go back to the invoice tab to create your own invoice.
First, start with selecting your customer under the Bill To section. Enter the invoice date and invoice number.
Then, it’s a matter of selecting the items in column D, the date in column E and Quantity in column F (if it’s a service item, the quantity won’t matter, a value of 1 will be assumed). The remaining fields should auto-populate. You can edit everything that is in yellow. Anything not in yellow means that it you should NOT modify it (Note: the actual template will not show this highlighting):
Once everything is good to go, you can click on the Generate Invoice button.
This will do two things:
Create a PDF of the invoice you just created and save it to the location specified, and
It will also add the invoice to the Invoice.List tab. This creates a ledger for you to track all the invoices that have been created. If an invoice number is already on there, it will not allow you to create a duplicate. It’s important that you do not delete the invoice number field if you’re changing the template around.
The Invoice.List tab will log all the relevant data from the invoice. This includes the number, date, when it was saved and by who, which folder, and even individual item sales.
Disclaimer
The goal of this template is to allow you to generate invoices as accurately as possible. It also helps you track all your invoices. However, it’s by no means a perfect solution as you could conceivably alter the data in the Invoice.List tab after the fact. What I’d recommend is password protecting the file or hiding the tab if it will be used by multiple users.
So if you choose to use this file, it’s just important to keep that in mind. By adding too many controls and preventing people from deleting or correcting items, it may end up being too much of a hassle. This template isn’t a substitute for accounting software and it’s intended to create and track invoices.
Please note it’s up to you to ensure that your invoice is accurate and correct. You should always double-check an invoice before sending it out.
Download
The invoice template is free to use although there is a limitation of 3 items per invoice. It will also have an ad in the ribbon. The full version is available here. It will remove the limitations, advertising, and the code for the VBA will be unlocked as well.
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