10 Excel Formulas Every Small Business Owner Should Know

Running a small business means living in spreadsheets — invoices, inventory, payroll, sales. You don't need to be an Excel expert, but a handful of formulas will save you hours every month. Here are the ten that do the most work, with examples you can adapt immediately.

1. SUM — totals. The workhorse. =SUM(B2:B20) adds a range. Use it for monthly revenue, expense columns, and order quantities.

2. SUMIF — conditional totals. Add only the rows that match a condition: =SUMIF(C2:C100,"East",D2:D100) totals column D wherever column C says "East." This is how you total sales by region, expenses by category, or hours by employee.

3. COUNTIF — conditional counts. =COUNTIF(E2:E100,"Paid") counts how many invoices are marked paid. Swap the criteria to count leads by stage, products by status, or anything you can label.

4. IF — decisions. Return one value when something is true and another when it's false: =IF(F2>1000,"Bonus",""). It's the foundation of every flag, alert, and category your sheet generates automatically.

5. VLOOKUP / XLOOKUP — pull data from a table. Look up a value and return a related one. =VLOOKUP(A2,Products!A:C,3,FALSE) finds the product in A2 and returns its price from the third column. If your Excel has XLOOKUP, prefer it — it's cleaner and can look left as well as right.

6. ROUND — clean numbers. =ROUND(G2,2) rounds to two decimal places. Essential for money, where stray fractions cause penny-off totals.

7. TODAY / DATEDIF — dates and aging. =TODAY() gives the current date; subtract a due date to get days overdue. =DATEDIF(start,end,"d") counts days between dates — useful for invoice aging and customer tenure.

8. CONCAT / TEXTJOIN — combine text. Build a full name or address from separate columns: =TEXTJOIN(" ",TRUE,A2,B2). Great for mailing lists and labels.

9. IFERROR — hide ugly errors. Wrap any formula that might fail so it shows a blank or a label instead of #N/A: =IFERROR(VLOOKUP(...),"Not found"). It keeps reports clean for clients.

10. SUMIFS / COUNTIFS — multiple conditions. When one condition isn't enough: =SUMIFS(Sales,Region,"East",Month,"June") totals East-region June sales. This is the formula that answers most real business questions.

Where to start. If you only learn three, make them SUM, IF, and SUMIF — together they cover totals, decisions, and conditional reporting, which is the bulk of what a small business spreadsheet needs to do.