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Excel Functions Every CPA Should Know

Western CPE Staff

Excel has a variety of functions that can be used in everyday practice, but most CPAs settle into a handful of familiar tools and build their entire workflow around them. It makes sense—you found what works, and there’s no obvious reason to change. But those routines can also become a ceiling. The functions and features you’re not using could be saving you real time and eliminating the kind of repetitive manual work that slows you down and invites errors.

The challenge in expanding your Excel capabilities has to do with context—knowing what tools to reach for, when, and how they fit into the work you’re already doing. Adding even a couple of new tools to your arsenal of Excel skills can meaningfully change your productivity. Here are five Excel tips to improve your productivity.

XLOOKUP: The LOOKUP You Don’t Have to Work Around

If you’ve ever used VLOOKUP and had to restructure your data because the lookup column wasn’t in the first position, you already understand the problem XLOOKUP solves. It searches any column and returns a result from any other column, regardless of where either one sits in your spreadsheet. There’s no column index number to count, no requirement to sort your data first, and the default match type is exact—which is what you wanted 99 percent of the time anyway.

Where this really matters for accountants is the built-in error handling. XLOOKUP lets you specify what to display when a match isn’t found, which eliminates the need to wrap your lookup inside an IFERROR or IFNA function. When you’re pulling data across workbooks or matching up records between systems, that’s one less nested formula to build and one less thing to troubleshoot when something breaks.

IFS: IFs Without the Nesting

Nested IF statements work. They’ve always worked. But once you’re three or four levels deep, they become difficult to read and even harder to edit without breaking something. IFS tests multiple conditions in sequence and returns the value associated with the first one that’s true—no nesting required. The formula reads left to right in plain logic—condition, result, condition, result—which makes it far easier for someone else to pick up your workbook and understand what’s happening without reverse-engineering a string of parentheses.

Any time you’re testing more than two conditions, IFS is a candidate. Think of a scenario where you need to tag records with one of several statuses—determining whether an event is at capacity, underbooked, or overbooked, or applying different pricing labels based on how old a product line is. Those are exactly the situations where nested IFs get unwieldy. However, there’s no built-in default result the way a nested IF has a final FALSE argument. If none of your conditions are met, IFS returns a #N/A error, so make sure your logic accounts for every scenario.

SUMIFS: Conditional Totals with Multiple Criteria

Most practitioners know SUMIF for adding up values that meet a single condition—say, totaling realtor commissions on houses above a certain price threshold. SUMIFS extends that by letting you apply up to 127 different criteria simultaneously. You might need to total sales for a specific customer, but only when the product is from a particular region and the quantity sold exceeds a minimum threshold. With SUMIF alone, that’s multiple formulas or helper columns. SUMIFS handles it in one. Its counterparts COUNTIFS and AVERAGEIFS work the same way for counting and averaging, and the whole family follows the same pattern. Learn one, and the rest are easy.

TEXTJOIN: Text Without the Tedium

Using CONCATENATE to join data from multiple cells is a pain. Each cell reference needs its own separator typed between the arguments. TEXTJOIN simplifies this—define the delimiter once, reference the entire range, and you’re done.

It also handles empty cells gracefully, skipping blank fields automatically so you don’t end up with extra separators cluttering your output. For anyone working with imported data, client records, or mailing lists where missing values are common, that alone is worth the switch from CONCATENATE.

AGGREGATE: Calculations That Work Despite Messy Data

You’ve probably seen this at your practice: you need to total or average a column of numbers, but scattered throughout the data are error values—a #N/A from a lookup that didn’t find a match, a #DIV/0! from an incomplete calculation. A standard SUM or AVERAGE formula chokes on the entire column.

AGGREGATE is the cleaner solution. It performs calculations on a range while letting you specify what to ignore—error values, hidden rows, or both—and it supports functions beyond just summing and averaging, including count, max, and min. For anyone working with data imported from other systems, trial balances still in progress, or large datasets where a handful of errors shouldn’t derail your analysis, AGGREGATE quietly solves the problem without restructuring anything.

Build the Skills Behind the Functions

Knowing what a function does is the starting point. Knowing how to apply it—when to choose it over alternatives, how to structure the arguments for your specific data, and how to combine it with other Excel tools—is where real proficiency lives. That’s the kind of working knowledge that changes your daily experience with Excel for accounting and finance.

If you’re looking for Excel CPE or want to sharpen your everyday skills, these courses will help you improve your performance: