Excel 365 on Ask Eijaz

Build an ASC 842 Lease Modification Tracker That Auto-Remeasures Liabilities and ROU Assets

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0530

Who this quietly bites

If you’re in corporate accounting, FP&A, or audit, you’ve seen this: a 60-month office lease gets renewed at month 36. The discount rate changes from 5.5% to 6.2%. The monthly payment jumps from $5,000 to $5,500. Under ASC 842, this is a modification — and it triggers a full remeasurement of both the lease liability and the right-of-use (ROU) asset.

Build an ASC 606 Contract Modification Engine That Auto-Classifies and Calculates Catch-Up Adjustments

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 03:17:00 +0530

Who this quietly bites

Separate contract — if the new goods are distinct AND the price is commensurate with standalone selling prices.
Prospective — if goods are distinct but the price isn’t commensurate.
Cumulative catch-up — if the goods aren’t distinct at all.

Here’s the problem: most finance teams classify these in email threads, sticky notes, or separate Word docs. The amortization schedule gets rebuilt manually in a new tab. Six months later, no one remembers why the numbers changed — and the catch-up adjustment that surprises the CFO in Q3 was actually a Q1 modification that was never properly documented.

Build a Loan Amortization Schedule in One Formula (No Helper Columns)

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Okay, real talk: almost every loan amortization schedule in the wild is held together with hope. You type PMT once, work out the interest and principal for row one, then drag the whole thing down 360 rows and call it a mortgage. It looks authoritative. It even reconciles to the penny — right up until someone inserts a row to add a note, changes the term from 30 years to 15, or refinances halfway through, and the entire ladder quietly comes apart at the seams.

Why Your NPV Is Wrong (and the XNPV Fix Analysts Swear By)

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Okay, real talk: =NPV(rate, values) is one of the most confidently wrong formulas in corporate finance. You select your cash flows, type the function, get a clean dollar figure, drop it in the board deck — and you’ve just discounted your entire project by one period too many. Excel’s NPV assumes the first number in your range arrives one full period from today, not today. Feed it your day-one capital outlay and it dutifully discounts money you’re spending right now as if it happens next year. The result is off by thousands, and it never once shows an error.

Build a Dropdown List That Removes Items Once They're Picked

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a sentence that should never be true, and yet: “Wait, didn’t we already give Laptop-04 to someone else?” Two people picked the same item from the same dropdown, on the same sheet, and Excel didn’t say a word — because a standard Data Validation list doesn’t know or care what’s already been chosen in the cells around it. It just shows the same static list, forever, to everyone. Fixing that isn’t hard once you know the trick, but almost nobody stumbles onto it by accident.

Fix Top-N Lists That Duplicate a Name When Scores Tie

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Picture this: you build a “Top 5 Sales Reps” report with the classic LARGE + MATCH combo, send it out, and someone replies “hey, why am I not on here? I know I beat Dana this month.” You check the raw numbers — they’re right, they tied with a teammate for third place. Your report doesn’t show them twice, and it doesn’t show an error. It just quietly shows their teammate’s name twice instead, and their name never appears anywhere. That’s not a data problem. That’s MATCH doing exactly what it’s documented to do — and it’s almost never what you want.

How to Find the LAST Matching Value (Not the First) in a List

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Quick gut-check: if the same Order ID, ticket number or SKU shows up more than once in your data — because you log every status change instead of overwriting it — what does VLOOKUP hand you back? Not the current status. The oldest one. Every single time. It’s one of the sneakiest, most common lookup mistakes in Excel, and almost nobody notices it’s happening because the formula never throws an error — it just confidently reports yesterday’s news as today’s truth.

Tiered Commission Formulas in Excel 365: Why VLOOKUP Gets It Wrong

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Okay, real talk: if you’ve ever built a commission plan, a bulk-discount schedule or a tax provision in Excel, you’ve probably written this exact formula — a VLOOKUP against a tier table. It looks confident. It returns a nice, clean number. And that number is quietly, cheerfully wrong, because it slaps one rate on the entire amount instead of giving each slice of it the rate it actually earned. Sales ops, RevOps and finance folks run into this all the time and don’t even notice, because the formula never errors out — it just over- or underpays and smiles about it.