Did someone say Fairy Godmother? 🧚

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Somebody much cleverer than me once wrote: 

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“It is physically impossible to run out of time. Time is infinite. There is a limitless amount of time”

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I’m guessing whoever said that wasn’t an auditor 🤷

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When you’re faced with a mountain of audit data, endless rows, and one too many enhanced pivot tables, there is no amount of time that is enough.

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We all want more time…or do we?

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Imagine for a second your Fairy Godmother pays you a visit in your dreams and grants your wish. She makes a copy of The Audit Toolbar magically appear in Excel. 

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She switches it on, turns it up, and it does its thing. It gives you back 40 auditing hours of your life that you’d otherwise spend waiting for your tables to stop pivoting.

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What are you going to do with it? How are you going to productively occupy the time you’ve always wished for, that’s just been handed back to you on a silver spreadsheet?

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• Make your guitar gently weep? - That guitar you bought in college? The one that’s only ever played the first chord of Amazing Grace. Maybe it’s time to go full Brian May on it.
• Saturday night at the movies - Sure, you’ve watched some classics, but have you actually made it through all three extended editions of Lord of the Rings?
• That podcast list - Everyone’s got a big  backlog of bookmarked podcasts they’ve never listened to. 40 hours could take you from “I’m curious about fashion” to “I’m practically an industry expert on the origins of denim.”
• Get rich -  It may not be the most adventurous option, but every hour you save could be money back in your pocket doing something else for your practice. Freeing up 40 hours isn’t pocket change. That’s real bottom-line stuff.

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If you’re an Audit Toolbar user, maybe you’re already wrestling with the challenge of how to spend the free time. If that’s you, just think of this newsletter as moral support.

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If you’re not an Audit Toolbar user, you’ve got a choice. 

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You could kick the can down the road and wake up in a few months chewing up just as much time fighting with the same formulas, and hunting down the same discrepancies. Or you could set The Audit Toolbar to work auto-flagging errors, validating data, and cross-referencing sheets while you flick through “Which Hobby” magazine.

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Here's what I’d do. You don’t need to decide on which hobby you’re going to choose, this second. But there’s really nothing to stop you adding The Audit Toolbar to Excel right now. It instals itself in seconds (it’s an Excel plugin), and if you can use Excel, you’re pretty much trained already.

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Install in haste, hobby at leisure.

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Why give 40 hours to work when The Audit Toolbar can do it in seconds, and you’ve got movies to watch?

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Until next week,
Christiaan

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