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The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration

Excel course for cost and management accountants

For cost and management accountants who prepare management accounts, cost reports and margin analysis in Excel. This page picks out the parts of The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration that this work uses: conditional totals for cost pools, lookups for rates, PivotTables for contribution by product or region, the FinanceGuard variance report, charts for the profit bridge, and margin measures on a Power Pivot data model.

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Taught by Sagnik Bhattacharya and Virginia Thorn

The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration: Sagnik Bhattacharya and Virginia Thorn

What you will be able to do

At work, you will be able to:

  • Total costs into pools by department or product with SUMIFS, and bring a standard rate onto each line of actual volumes with XLOOKUP or INDEX and MATCH.
  • Report variance and percent variance by department and category in the FinanceGuard model, read through KPI cards, a combo chart and slicers.
  • Add profit and margin columns in Power Query, and measure margin percent and percent of total by product with DAX on a Power Pivot data model.
  • Show contribution by product, region or month with PivotTables, grouped by date and filtered with slicers.
  • Present the walk from budgeted to actual profit with a waterfall chart, and margins over time with a combo chart and sparklines.
  • Have Copilot list orders with negative profit or odd discounts, then check its answer before it reaches a report.

Projects

What you will build.

The course has 14 projects. These three matter most here.

  • Budget vs actual dashboard in Excel (FinanceGuard): total budget, actuals and variance cards above a monthly line chart and a column chart by department.

    Project 09

    FinanceGuard

    The budget vs actual report finance teams send every month.

    Spend set against plan for each department and category, the gap shown in money and in percent, and the result read through KPI cards and a combo chart.

  • Power Query sales report in Excel (SalesFusion): sales by category, sales by region and a monthly trend, with slicers for channel, year, category and region.

    Project 12

    SalesFusion

    A sales report that refreshes itself from a folder of files.

    Margin by product and region on a data model: Power Query adds the profit columns, Power Pivot relates the tables, and DAX returns margin percent and each product's share of the total.

  • Excel PivotTables and a PivotChart of sales data (SalesPlusPerformance): net sales by product category as a column chart, with State, Region and City filters.

    Project 05

    SalesPlusPerformance

    A sales question answered in seconds, straight from the order data.

    Its PivotTables are the build for contribution by product category, region or month, refreshed as new orders come in.

Lessons

The lessons that matter, in course order.

The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration has 186 lessons. This page picks out 52 of them, 4 h 34 min of video. Each lesson keeps its number in the course.

Where to start

Lesson 36 SUMIF and COUNTIF in Excel

Begin at Lesson 36 if you already build cost sheets with simple formulas: conditional totals are where pools and allocations start. New to Excel? Begin at Lesson 1. If SUMIFS, lookups and PivotTables are routine, go to Lesson 115 for the variance report or Lesson 153 for margin analysis on a data model.

52 of 186 lessons · 4 h 34 min

04 Essential formulas and functions (IF, SUMIF and more) 2 of 13 lessons · 15 min SUMIF and SUMIFS: the conditional totals that cost pools, departmental spend and allocations by driver are built from.
  1. 36 Start here SUMIF and COUNTIF in Excel Conditional sum and count with one criterion 8 min
  2. 37 SUMIFS and COUNTIFS in Excel Sum and count with multiple criteria 7 min
06 Data visualisation: charts and graphs 4 of 9 lessons · 21 min Combo charts with a secondary axis, chart formatting, sparklines beside monthly margins, and the waterfall chart for a profit bridge. The lessons chart marketing data.
  1. 52 Combo charts in Excel Column and line chart with a secondary axis 4 min
  2. 53 Formatting charts in Excel Titles, data labels, colours and chart styles 7 min
  3. 54 Sparklines in Excel Line, column and win-loss mini charts in cells 5 min
  4. 55 Funnel, Pareto and waterfall charts in Excel Modern charts for business data 5 min
07 PivotTables and PivotCharts: data analysis made easy 10 lessons · 33 min PivotTables for contribution and cost by product, region or month: building the table, grouping by date, slicers, PivotCharts, report layouts and Refresh. The lessons use sales orders.
  1. 57 PivotTables 101 in Excel What a PivotTable does and the sales dataset 5 min
  2. 58 Preparing data for PivotTables Clean data with TRIM, PROPER, find and replace 5 min
  3. 59 Create your first PivotTable in Excel Insert a PivotTable from a sales table 1 min
  4. 60 PivotTable fields in Excel Rows, values, columns and Value Field Settings 2 min
  5. 61 PivotTable summaries in Excel Sales by product category and grouping by date 4 min
  6. 62 Slicers in Excel Filter PivotTables with clickable buttons 3 min
  7. 63 PivotCharts in Excel Create interactive charts from a PivotTable 5 min
  8. 64 PivotTable design Tab Report layouts, PivotTable styles and number formats 5 min
  9. 65 Refresh a PivotTable in Excel Update pivots when source data changes 2 min
  10. 66 Excel Ninja Challenge PivotTable sales by region, category and monthly trend 1 min
08 Advanced Excel functions: lookups, text and arrays 4 of 12 lessons · 19 min VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, IFERROR and INDEX and MATCH, for bringing a standard cost or an overhead rate from one table onto every line of another.
  1. 68 VLOOKUP in Excel Find employee data across sheets with exact match 4 min
  2. 69 XLOOKUP in Excel Exact match, if not found and two-way lookup 6 min
  3. 70 IFERROR in Excel Handle lookup errors in VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP formulas 3 min
  4. 71 INDEX and MATCH in Excel A flexible alternative to VLOOKUP 6 min
10 Boosting productivity with AI in Excel (Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude) 1 of 17 lessons · 7 min Copilot looks for discounts, negative profit and suspect rows in a sales table: a first scan for orders that lose money, checked before anyone acts on it.
  1. 96 Find outliers with Copilot in Excel Discounts, negative profit, suspect rows 7 min
12 Project: FinanceGuard budget variance analyser (budget vs actual Excel dashboard) 10 lessons · 52 min FinanceGuard: budget and actual tables, a model in SUMIFS, UNIQUE, VSTACK, LET and TEXTSPLIT, variance and percent variance with custom number formats, PivotTables, KPI cards, a combo chart and slicers for month, department and category.
  1. 115 FinanceGuard budget vs actual dashboard Excel project overview 3 min
  2. 116 Excel tables for budget and actual data Organise the FinanceGuard datasets 4 min
  3. 117 Budget vs actual model in Excel SORT, UNIQUE, VSTACK, LET, TEXTSPLIT, SUMIFS 8 min
  4. 118 Budget variance in Excel Calculate variance and percent variance 4 min
  5. 119 Custom number formats in Excel Show budget variances with colours and signs 2 min
  6. 120 PivotTables for budget vs actual The FinanceGuard pivot workspace 8 min
  7. 121 KPI cards in Excel Summary cards for a budget variance dashboard 4 min
  8. 122 Budget vs actual charts in Excel Combo chart with secondary axis for variance 5 min
  9. 123 Slicers and PivotCharts in Excel Interactive FinanceGuard budget dashboard 4 min
  10. 124 Finish the FinanceGuard dashboard in Excel Final polish and variance insights 10 min
15 SalesFusion: advanced data tools and a Power Query modelling system 21 lessons · 2 h 7 min SalesFusion: Power Query cleans and combines the sales files, adds custom and conditional columns for profitability and profit metrics, merges product and region lookups and appends history; Power Pivot relates the tables and DAX measures give total sales, margin percent and percent of total. The Power Pivot lessons need Excel for Windows.
  1. 153 SalesFusion Power Query project Excel ETL pipeline and data model overview 5 min
  2. 154 Introduction to Power Query in Excel The ETL workflow explained 5 min
  3. 155 Import a CSV with Power Query Get data from text and transform data 2 min
  4. 156 Clean columns in Power Query Remove and rename columns for modelling 5 min
  5. 157 Clean text in Power Query Trim, clean, replace values and fix text case 6 min
  6. 158 Data types in Power Query Fix date, whole number, decimal and text types 7 min
  7. 159 Date columns in Power Query Add year, month and year-month fields for reports 7 min
  8. 160 Business logic in Power Query Custom and conditional columns for profitability 6 min
  9. 161 Group By in Power Query Summarise sales by month and region to validate data 5 min
  10. 162 Close and Load in Power Query Connection only, table or Data Model 5 min
  11. 163 Merge queries in Power Query Look up product and region names with a left join 5 min
  12. 164 Reuse a Power Query pipeline Duplicate queries for a new year of sales data 5 min
  13. 165 Append queries in Power Query Combine 2024 and 2025 sales tables 3 min
  14. 166 From Folder in Power Query Combine every sales file in a folder automatically 9 min
  15. 167 From Folder automation in Power Query Profit metrics and fiscal year columns 7 min
  16. 168 Build a sales fact table in Power Query Merge lookups and append history 6 min
  17. 169 Power Pivot Data Model in Excel Relationships and Diagram View 6 min
  18. 170 DAX measures in Power Pivot Total sales, margin percent and percent of total 10 min
  19. 171 PivotTable report from the Data Model Format the SalesFusion report in Excel 5 min
  20. 172 Interactive Excel dashboard Data model PivotTables, slicers and styling 10 min
  21. 173 Unpivot columns in Power Query Turn wide month columns into a long table 8 min

Instructors

Who teaches it.

Virginia Thorn smiling at the camera, dark hair tied back, wearing a navy top.

Instructor, Excel with AI

Virginia Thorn

Emmy Award winner. Teaches Excel with AI at Coding Liquids.

Questions

Asked before starting.

Is there an Excel course for management accountants?

Yes. The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration from Coding Liquids teaches the Excel behind management accounts: SUMIFS for cost pools and allocations, lookups for standard rates, PivotTables for contribution by product or region, the FinanceGuard variance report, a waterfall chart for the profit bridge, and margin percent with DAX in SalesFusion. The 52 lessons on this page come to 4 hours 34 minutes of the course's 16 hours.

Does the course teach costing methods such as standard or activity-based costing?

No. The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration teaches Excel, not cost accounting: standard, marginal and activity-based costing, standard cost variances, break-even analysis with Goal Seek and ERP costing modules are not covered. It teaches the Excel those methods are worked in: conditional totals, lookups of rates, variance reporting and margin measures.

Can I analyse margin by product in Excel with it?

Yes. In SalesFusion, part of The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration, Power Query adds profitability columns to the sales data, Power Pivot relates the sales table to product and region tables, and DAX measures give margin percent and percent of total, read in a PivotTable report and a dashboard. A Copilot lesson also finds the rows with negative profit.

How do I allocate overheads in Excel?

No lesson in The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration allocates overheads, but the parts of an allocation are taught: SUMIFS totals each cost pool and each driver, each department's share of the driver is a percentage of the total (the percentages and absolute references lessons near the start cover that arithmetic), and XLOOKUP brings a rate onto the lines it applies to.

Excel with AI

See the whole course.

The Complete Excel Course with AI Integration: 16 hours of video in 186 lessons, built around 14 projects, with lifetime access, a Certificate of Completion and a 14-day money-back guarantee.

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