Accounting Excel test: skills to practice and a 14-day plan
Accounting roles test whether you can summarize, reconcile and clean data quickly without breaking formulas. Expect SUMIFS-style summaries, lookups with missing values, and month-end date logic.
What employers usually test
Try a sample task
From lesson 12, Tiered lookups & IFERROR. Graded instantly.
Unknown SKUs
In
C2, look up the unit price for each SKU from E2:F5. If the SKU isn't in the price list, show Check SKU. Fill down to C6.Your 14-day prep plan
About 30 minutes a day. Free lessons first; Pro lessons are marked.
| Day | Focus | Access | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | SUM, AVERAGE, MIN, MAX & COUNT | Free | 22 min |
| 2 | Relative vs absolute references | Free | 24 min |
| 3 | The IF function | Free | 22 min |
| 4 | COUNTIF & SUMIF | Free | 23 min |
| 5 | COUNTIFS, SUMIFS & AVERAGEIFS | Free | 25 min |
| 6 | VLOOKUP | Pro | 24 min |
| 7 | XLOOKUP | Pro | 24 min |
| 8 | Tiered lookups & IFERROR | Pro | 24 min |
| 9 | Cleaning messy data | Pro | 23 min |
| 10 | DATE, YEAR, MONTH & TEXT | Pro | 23 min |
| 11 | EDATE, EOMONTH & NETWORKDAYS | Pro | 24 min |
| 12 | ROUND, ROUNDUP & ROUNDDOWN | Pro | 22 min |
| 13 | Timed run: the analyst interview capstone | Pro | 20 min |
| 14 | Retake the skills test and compare | Free | 10 min |
Questions
Which functions come up most?
Conditional totals (SUMIF and SUMIFS), lookups, and rounding. Expect at least one task where a lookup value is missing and you have to handle the error.
Will I need pivot tables?
Many accounting tests include one. The formula skills here make pivots easier to check, because you can reproduce any pivot total with SUMIFS.
How long should I prepare?
Two weeks at about 30 minutes a day is enough for most screening tests.