Financial Modelling Handbook

The lifetime of a financial model can be surprisingly long. And over that lifetime, lots will change. You'll likely have multiple versions of the files with numerous changes between each version. The output sheet is useful for tracking how the numbers produced by the model change. We also

The Change Log sheet gives you a process for structured tracking of changes to your model. Hopefully, in the future, this will become redundant when Microsoft implements proper change tracking in Excel. This Chapter covers setting up the Change Log sheet. Once the sheet is set up, read the Change

Your balance sheet doesn't balance. You've been staring at it for hours, trying to figure out why. It's time to stop randomly paging around the model, hoping to find the error and apply a structured approach to identifying the cause.

The output sheet helps analyse and understand differences between model runs at a high level. Sometimes, however, we need to see how differences change over time, in more detail, and on specific line items that may not even be on our output sheet.

Model review is essential for error reduction. For a review to be effective, we need to make it easy to leave comments in a model.

Some references before you start: * Download the latest version of the macros * Guidance on setting up the macros * Customising the macros and changing the settings * Release notes for the latest version of the macros Hide / Unhide macros Ctrl+shift+7 The macros file is designed to run in the hidden

In order to function correctly, there are a small number of cell ranges in the model that the Productivity Macros need to be able to use.

It's time to address all the things we told ourselves we'd come back later and fix.

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Like checking for duplicate row labels, checking the units in your model is not something you'll have to do very often. It can help you pick up errors and inconsistencies, however. Quite often, inconsistencies can creep into the units in our model. For example, we might be working