help please - variance report

[Mike or Penny Novack]

>
>
>The committee last night asked me to produce a monthly variance report and 
>explained that it was a report showing the difference between the monthly 
>actual amounts received and spent and the expected amounts that were set when 
>making applications for grants. I guess they mean a budget.
>
>Can gnucash help me to do this, and if so, how? I have looked through the mail 
>archives and cannot find anything.
>  
>
Just so -- you produce a budget report and an actual transactions 
report. From these you produce (by hand) the requested "variance report".

Could/should GnuCash (or any other similar application) be able to 
produce the "variance report" automaticly? Probably not. This is a case 
where any/all discrepancies are probably going to need annotation. It 
wouldn't really help to have an automated "variance" report produced "in 
editable form" as in real life you might sometimes have to annotate 
items which were NOT numerical discrepancies*. In other words, the whole 
report has to be editable so might as well be a document produced by hand.

Michael

* Example --- a large bill due in the period in question that was not 
paid because under dispute. Or perhaps a large amount where the vendor 
was late sending an invoice. Something like that represents a contingent 
discrepancy from budget and should be noted in a variance report for 
this period as an alert that their is a "bombshell" lurking. Especially 
as your organization seems to involve grants, obviously budgeted amounts 
and amounts spent might get out of sink with grant money promised but 
not actually received.

Thankfully this is something that I don't have to do for my 
organization. Our income being relatively regular during the year but 
our expenditures so heavily skewed to just the few months of the growing 
season a monthly "cash flow analysis" would be meaningless.

-- 
There is no possibility of social justice on a dead planet except the equality of the grave.