Control Travel Spend Before It Happens, Not After The Trip Right now, keeping travel spend in line probably means approving trips one at a time, spotting the off policy hotel only after it is booked, and finding out someone blew past budget when the statement lands. BILL Travel flips that around. You set the travel policies, the budgets, and the card limits up front, and your people book their own flights and hotels inside those rules. The guardrails are built into the booking, so the off policy trip mostly cannot happen in the first place. Every trip is tied to a budget and a BILL card, so you watch travel spend in real time instead of reconciling it weeks later. Your team gets to book their own travel, you keep your hand on the money, and nobody has to play travel cop. See how the controls work

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Hey Reader,
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Lookup functions are REALLY popular in Excel…
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because they allow you to “look up” a value from a dataset, based on criteria that you enter.
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Most people focus only on VLOOKUP, without realizing there is a far more powerful lookup function called XLOOKUP.

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Let’s explore these 3 lookup functions and become a pro...

💡 How it works → Searches VERTICALLY in the first column of a specified range and returns a value in the same row from a column you specify.
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🧮 Syntax → =VLOOKUP(lookup_value, table_array, col_index_num, [range_lookup])
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​Pros →Easy to use for vertical lookups, supported in all versions of Excel.
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​Cons → Limited to vertical searches; searches must start in the first column of the range.
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​My take → VLOOKUP is probably the most common lookup function, but it’s sooo limited. Learn to ditch this function and focus on XLOOKUP!

💡 How it works → Searches HORIZONTALLY in the first row of a specified range and returns a value in the same column from a row you specify.
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🧮 Syntax → =HLOOKUP(lookup_value, table_array, row_index_num, [range_lookup])
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​Pros → Useful for horizontal lookups, supported in all versions of Excel.
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​Cons → Limited to horizontal searches, Inefficient with large datasets.
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My take → HLOOKUP isn’t as popular as VLOOKUP, but is very similar. As mentioned above…while this may get the job done, there is bigger and better available with XLOOKUP.

💡 How it works → Searches for a value in an array or range in EITHER DIRECTION and returns a value from a corresponding array or range.
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🧮 Syntax → =XLOOKUP(lookup_value, lookup_array, return_array, [if_not_found]
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​Pros → Can search in any direction, allows for return of an array, and provides an option for a default value if no match is found; it is very efficient.
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​Cons → Only available in Excel for Office 365, Excel 2019, and later versions, can be complex
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​My take → XLOOKUP solves all the issues that VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP have, and little by little will be taking over the Excel lookup universe.

What makes this even more powerful is when you nest another XLOOKUP inside your XLOOKUP to allow you to find the value with both your X and Y axis.

Grab the Excel worksheet + high-resolution infographic for FREE

That’s my take on these 3 common lookup functions

Which one is your favorite?
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Let me know by replying to this email.

Till next time

Josh
Your CFO Guy