What is so great about  financial templates? They save a lot of time!   If you are an accounting professional , you surely respect your time, since your time is the product you sell to your customers . Everything we do requires time. If I could save 30 minutes dailyusing financial templates, I’d jump at the opportunity! Every bit of time adds up and pretty soon you have gained enough time to take on a new client or offer a new service.

Imagine what you could do , if you saved an hour or more each day! Yes, financial templates are our friends . You can use them for almost every repetitious task you perform for your customers , if you are an accounting professional. For example, when setting up a bank reconciliation file for a new customer , you can reach for a bank reconciliation template. When a customer needs a Balance Sheet for a lending institution , you can start with the Balance Sheet template. When someone is looking for an example of a Business Plan presentation for his financials, all you need to do is get the business plan financial templates.

Sometimes, wanting to save even more time, we can look for financial templates online to get started, but you may be often disappointed with what you find. Most financial templates do not seem to have been created by finance or accounting professionals, but rather by Excel experts. With Excel, just as with any other software, the developer needs to work very, very closely with the user (in this case the accountant or finance professional) for the software to work well . If he doesn’t, the result is almost always less than satisfactory.

Since Excel is so commonly used by accounting professionals, many of them have become quite expert at it. In that case you have the perfect combination - the software expert and the user of the template in one. But unless that is the case, you may end up with a template that will be deficient in some basic way.

Also, unless financial templates have been created and tested in real-life business situations, they will always lack something. Fixing them is often just as time consuming, if not more, than making them from scratch.

Many financial templates evolve over time as they are first created for one’s own use and then refined to accommodate more and more situations and variations . Again, if you are a professional and bill for your time, you need to keep track of time. And so, for example, a time sheet template is something you would need throughout the day, logging in the time spent on different projects and clients . This time sheet template has to be flexible enough to allow to use different rates per project and per client, to give plenty of space to document what you are working on for billing purposes, etc. It also has to compute any interval of time, so you don’t need to worry about rounding anything to the nearest quarter of an hour.

It’s hard to even imagine having to start from ground zero every time one needed a financial statement, a sales invoice, a time sheet template, a break even analysis and many, many more financial schedules .

Financial templates also save your mental energy.   When you have well-designed spreadsheet , you don’t need to even think of doublechecking your totals , changing the header, setting up the way the report will print, etc. A good template frees you to focus on the substance of what you are doing , not the mechanics.

If you develop your own financial templates, you have another advantage. Since you probably work with many clients , you can transfer the experience with client A to clients B and C, if it would be helpful to them as well. That’s another reason and another way in which professionally designed financial templates will have improved over time. And that’s why the best financial templates are those which are actually used on a daily basis by the person who creates them. It is only by using them that you can make sure they work error-free , you can finetune them and discover all possible ways to make them even better .

It is a good rule to never do anything from scratch twice, just once. And for an accounting professional, once it’s done, it becomes a financial template. Next time you perform the same task, it will take much less time to do it.

For someone who is not a finance professional, financial templates serve an added purpose . They supply a structure for the financial schedule which that person might not be familiar with, if it weren’t for the template. For example, the template will guide them as to what data to enter into the form, be it a Profit & Loss Statement or a Cash Flow Forecast. The mere fact that the template has certain line items - like the cash balances, accounts receivable, fixed assets, liabilities, etc.on the Balance Sheet, for example, forces one to think in a well-organized fashion and gather the correct financial information according to the format of the template.

The same goes for a Business Plan. A good financial template can steer you away from making some fundamental mistakes. It isn’t unusual to see a self-prepared Business Plan in which many line items found on the Profit & Loss statement really should be on the Balance Sheet. With a professionally designed template, you wouldn’t make such a mistake.

So, next time you are about to start a financial project , find a professionally designed template first. And for those of you who have very unique requirements when it comes to your financial templates, customization services are available as well.