Excel for UAE Accountants

A self-study Excel course written for accountants and finance staff who work with UAE data every day: bank exports, VAT at 5%, AED amounts, DD/MM/YYYY dates. Seven lessons, 54 exercises, a 21-question quiz, and every practice workbook has an answer key.

The seven lessons: 1. Lookups that do not break: VLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH, XLOOKUP, and approximate-match tiers for commission and discounts 2. Clean the data before you trust it: a messy bank export with text dates, amounts with commas and brackets, stray spaces and duplicates 3. SUMIFS and conditional totals: SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, AVERAGEIFS, LARGE, SUMPRODUCT, EOMONTH and a cost-centre by month grid that must tie to the ledger 4. Pivot tables for finance reports: building, grouping by month, calculated margin, and tying every pivot back to the source total 5. Reconciliation tricks: a running COUNTIF match, the divisible-by-9 test for transpositions, half-difference test, adjusted bank and cash book balances 6. VAT workings at 5%: net and VAT from gross, expected versus charged VAT on 36 invoices, 15-digit TRN format check, totals by VAT code and by quarter 7. Find the error: why a trial balance is out by AED 3,600, numbers stored as text, ranges that stop early, and checks that catch it next time

What you get:

• A Word course guide with the tools, a walk-through, common mistakes and the exercises for each lesson
• Seven practice workbooks with fictional UAE data and yellow answer cells
• Seven answer-key workbooks where every answer is a live formula you can inspect
• A 21-question quiz with a printable answer key, plus each exercise answer with its formula and the reason

Every exercise answer was calculated twice, once independently from the data and once by recalculating the answer workbook, and the two agreed on all 54.

Honest limits: this teaches Excel techniques for accounting tasks. It is not an accounting, tax or legal course. XLOOKUP needs Excel 2021 or Microsoft 365, and INDEX and MATCH alternatives are shown. Pivot table steps are described in the guide, but the author could not check them in Excel: the workbooks give the totals your pivots must match. The VAT lesson covers workings only, not reverse charge, imports or partial exemption, and the rate and rules must be confirmed with the FTA or your accountant.

Requirements: Microsoft Excel 2016 or later (2021 or Microsoft 365 for XLOOKUP) and Word or Google Docs for the guide. Basic comfort with formulas such as SUM.