Accounting specific advice for creating workpapers?
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I'm currently working as an accountant at a company where many of the workpapers are a patchwork mess. I went to school for both accounting and data analytics, so I understand some basic data design principles. I also have a basic understanding of Excel and Power Query.
The main issue I have is that from my experience accounting files often have different requirements than a data model used for FP&A. Our files need to be reviewable, auditable, ect. since our job invovles regular audits and compliance checks. We need to maintain the support and basically have monthly snapshots of our work.
Currently I have been designing the workpapers with tabs specficially for pasting in the report data and then referencing that with Power Query. While this is okay, it can be a little clunky and involve an intermediate step sometimes. For instance, instead of manually inputing invoice data into a workpaper, I created a separate excel file which uses Power Query to pull information from several folders where I dump copies of invoices based on format. Then I copy and paste that data into our actual workpaper.
What is some advice you would give to someone recreating workpapers and how data is treated in an accounting environment?
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