Excel Competency for the Professional Accountant: Advanced Applications, Controls, and Audit Add-ins

Abstract

Personal experience indicates that many accounting students do not understand Excel sufficiently well to master spreadsheet controls required for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance or International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption. Students are typically exposed to Excel at various levels of intensity in high school and college, but the exposure is inadequate in the breadth and depth necessary for compliance within the regulatory requirements and professional accounting standards. Some authors are forecasting extensive use of spreadsheets or manual processes to reconcile dual reporting of traditional U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) (Difazio and Gannon 2010; Steele 2010). Moreover, error rates of over 90% have been documented in accounting applications using Excel before SOX compliance (Panko 2008). Given this environment, we argue that an Accounting Information Systems (AIS) curriculum can be enhanced by first teaching the functional competency in Excel to students and then integrating such Excel knowledge within the typical AIS coursework that includes The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations (COSO) standards, SOX, Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBiT), computer assisted audit tools (CAATs), and eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Our adoption of this approach resulted in increased student competency, better teaching evaluations, and more desirable accounting graduates.