Is using a Monroe calculator quicker than Microsoft Excel?

It's now 2018, and you may be thinking...how the heck could a printing calculator possibly make accounting easier than Excel? 

And honestly, we get it. We understand how and why you could think that. Excel is what you've been taught. It's what you've trained on. 

But the truth is, there's a lot of downtime with Excel that you don't even realize. 

Let's walk through the process of preparing excel to add a string of numbers, versus a printing calculator. 

Excel

1) Open Excel on your desktop. 

2) Click into the cell you want to work in

3) Type Equals sign

4) Enter your calculations

5) Hit Enter and get your total.

6) Save your Excel Sheet

7) Print your Excel Sheet

8) Walk across the office to retrieve your Excel Sheet from the printer

Calculator

1) Reach over to your printing calculator

2) Enter your calculations

3) Hit Total key and get your total. 

4) Tear audit trail off of your printing calculator

Not only does a calculator perform the operation in half the steps, but it also allows you to see your specific calculations on the audit trail. This is similar to seeing your formulas in excel, except that a printed excel sheet only shows your final numbers, and not necessarily the formula you used to get there. With a Monroe, when you want to audit your work, you can see exactly how you got there. This is perfect for showing your work; whether you're an intern presenting your calculations to your boss, or you're a boss auditing your employee's work.

Calculators also save time by eliminating wasted motions such as: extracting the data from different types of documents; i.e. pdfs, and convert to excel, changing the color of your negative values, needing to switch windows, load your program, situate your mouse, clear the screen, name your tab, etc. 

These sound like relatively minor things, but they add up quickly and can cause unnecessary stress and frustration for the user. 

Another huge advantage to the printing calculator is that the minus and the plus signs are added after the number, instead of before. 

For example, in Excel you would enter 5-5. On a printing calculator you would enter 5+5-. This logic can be thought of the same way a balance sheet can with debits and credits. So 5+ can be thought of as a $5 debit to your account, and 5- would be a $5 credit to your account. This logic typically resides much better with accountants since they are trained to think this way.

After becoming accustomed to the printing calculator, nearly all of our users report being able to type more quickly and efficiently on a printing calculator than on a ten key. In addition, many report that the calculator has a much softer and comfortable key touch than a ten key. This is due to the 

Disadvantage:

The major disadvantage to a printing calculator is that if you make an error and catch it after totaling your work, you'll typically have to retype the entire entry. If you're concerned about this, Monroe does offer the UltimateX, the only printing calculator on the market that solves this issue by enabling the user to go back, edit and reprint their previous entry. 

Next Steps:

If you've been using Excel, it's time to consider the switch. Some products never go out of style; the printing calculator is one of them. It's stood the test of time, being on the market for 106 years and running. As shown in this article, it has the ability to make you more productive, while reducing down time and making your life easier. In our humble opinion, it's a product worth investing in.