Short course
Advanced Excel for human resources
In the vast majority of organisations, staff management relies on scattered files: a staff list somewhere, a leave table elsewhere, a payroll recalculated by hand every month, and no consolidated indicators. The human resources department then spends its time looking for information instead of analysing it, and the slightest request from management or a donor turns into a day's work.
- Duration
- Short module, 5 sessions of 3 hours, 15 hours
- Format
- In person or online
- Credential
- Certificate of attendance
Tuition75,000 XOF
By the end of the programme, you will be able to
- Build a single staff file that is clean, up to date and usable
- Keep individual records and track contract and probation period deadlines
- Track absences, leave, leave balances and working time
- Calculate payroll items, contributions and deductions with checked formulas
- Produce a monthly payroll statement, a payroll journal and the basic statutory returns
- Track and analyse the payroll and its structure
- Calculate the usual HR indicators: headcount, turnover, length of service, age pyramid, gender balance
- Build a one-page HR dashboard for management
- Track the training plan and performance appraisals
- Use artificial intelligence to write, explain and correct payroll formulas
- Have staff management documents drafted and adapted, then review them critically
- Handle staff data while respecting confidentiality
Who it is for
Target audience
The module is for people who manage staff or produce staff reports: human resources managers and assistants, personnel administrators, administrative and finance managers, accountants in charge of payroll, business owners and SME managers, administrative managers of NGOs and projects, executive secretaries.
Prerequisites
Two requirements:
- Be able to use a computer and have worked in an Excel workbook before, even without mastering it
- Have a laptop, or rent one from the centre for the duration of the module
No prior knowledge of formulas is required. Participants are invited to bring their organisation's data, anonymised if necessary: the workbook built in class is their own.
Detailed program
5 sessions · 15 h of teaching
- Why a poorly designed staff file costs more than having no file at all
- The essential information in an individual record, and what should not be stored
- The single database principle: one row per employee, one column per piece of information
- Reference lists: positions, departments, grades, contract types, sites
- Drop-down lists, data validation and input checks
- Date formats and automatic calculation of age and length of service
- Structured tables and named ranges, for a workbook that ages well
- Protecting sheets, hiding data and managing confidentiality
- Finding an individual record by ID, and the automatic employee sheet
- Exercise: build your organisation's staff file, with its real reference lists
- Tracking contracts: type, start date, end date, probation period, renewal
- Automatic deadline alerts with conditional formatting
- The absence register: reasons, supporting documents, durations, impact on payroll
- Calculating leave entitlement, leave taken and the remaining balance
- Calculating working days and business days, and handling public holidays
- Tracking working time, overtime and on-call duty
- The team schedule and the annual leave calendar
- The conditional and date functions essential to these calculations
- The summary table of absences by department and by month
- Exercise: build the leave and absence tracker, with deadline alerts
- The architecture of a payroll workbook: settings, bases, calculations, reports
- The settings sheet: contribution rates, ceilings, scales, changed in a single place
- Calculating gross pay: base salary, bonuses, allowances, overtime
- Deductions and social security contributions, employee and employer
- Calculating income tax on salaries with a progressive scale
- Moving from gross to net pay, checked step by step
- The individual payslip generated automatically from the journal
- The monthly payroll journal and summary statutory returns
- Tracking total payroll, its structure and its trends
- The consistency checks that prevent payroll errors, and setting them up systematically
- Exercise: set up a complete payroll workbook for a real workforce and check it
- HR indicators that make sense: headcount, turnover, absenteeism rate, average length of service
- The age pyramid and breakdown by sex, grade and site
- Tracking gender balance and equality commitments
- Pivot tables to analyse the workforce from every angle
- Slicers and timelines for an interactive dashboard
- Choosing the right chart and the readability rules to follow
- The one-page HR dashboard: what management must see every month
- Tracking the training plan, costs and participants
- Tracking performance appraisals and annual reviews
- Exercise: build your organisation's HR dashboard
- What artificial intelligence really brings to a human resources department
- The confidentiality rule: staff data that is never sent to an external service
- Anonymising a file before any assisted processing
- Having a complex payroll formula written and explained, then checking it yourself
- Having a broken formula fixed and understanding the proposed correction
- Having a poorly kept staff list cleaned: names, duplicates, dates, job titles
- Having a job description, a job advertisement and an interview grid drafted, then reworking them
- Having a contract template, an internal memo or a disciplinary letter drafted, subject to legal review
- Having an HR indicators table commented and getting an analysis text to rework
- Producing the HR summary for management or the board
- Assisted screening of applications, its benefits and the risks of bias to control
- Automating the sending of payslips and deadline alerts, without programming
- Final exercise: finalise your workbook, produce your commented HR summary and present it to the group
- Presentation of attestations
Assessment and certification
The training attestation is issued to participants who have attended at least four of the five sessions and submitted their finalised staff management workbook. It states the module title, the 15-hour duration, the dates and the skills acquired, and carries a unique number with a verification code.
Participants also receive:
- The staff management workbook they built
- A configurable model payroll workbook, with rates and scales isolated in a dedicated sheet
- A ready-to-use HR dashboard template
- The complete course material in PDF, session by session
- A quick reference of Excel formulas useful in staff management
- A library of ready-to-use prompts for artificial intelligence assistants
- Templates for job descriptions, interview grids and training tracking
Upcoming sessions
Next dates being prepared
Leave your email: we will let you know as soon as registration opens.
Frequently asked questions
75,000 XOF per participant. Training for a team or an organisation is quoted on request.
5 sessions of 3 hours, 15 hours.
Yes: you can attend onsite or online, as you prefer.
Two requirements: be able to use a computer and have worked in an Excel workbook before, even without mastering it ; have a laptop, or rent one from the centre for the duration of the module ; no prior knowledge of formulas is required. Participants are invited to bring their organisation's data, anonymised if necessary: the workbook built in class is their own.
A certificate of attendance is issued at the end of the course.
Fill in the online enrolment request: no payment is taken on the site. The firm reviews your application, then contacts you to confirm your place and the payment terms. No session is scheduled yet: leave your email on this page to be told when registration opens.
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Cohorts are deliberately small to guarantee genuine individual support. Reserve your place or ask us your questions.